|
from: Univ. of Massachusetts Press
Amazon.com's Price: $80.00 Prices subject to change. Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 001.109730904
EAN: 9781558495302
ISBN: 1558495304
Label: Univ. of Massachusetts Press
Manufacturer: Univ. of Massachusetts Press
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 294
Publication Date: May 31, 2006
Publisher: Univ. of Massachusetts Press
Sales Rank: 6146314
Studio: Univ. of Massachusetts Press
Editorial Review:
Product Description:
Sixty years ago, at the height of World War II, an extraordinary series of gatherings took place at Mount Holyoke College in western Massachusetts. During the summers of 1942 1944, leading European figures in the arts and sciences met at the college with their American counterparts for urgent conversations about the future of human civilization in a precarious world.
Two Sorbonne professors, the distinguished medievalist Gustave Cohen and the existentialist philosopher Jean Wahl, organized these Pontigny sessions, named after an abbey in Burgundy where similar symposia had been held in the decades before the war. Among the participants many of whom were Jewish or had Jewish backgrounds were the philosophers Hannah Arendt and Rachel Bespaloff, the poets Marianne Moore and Wallace Stevens, the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss and the linguist Roman Jakobson, and the painters Marc Chagall and Robert Motherwell.
In this collection of original essays, Stanley Cavell and Jacques Derrida lead an international group of scholars including Jed Perl, Mary Ann Caws, Jeffrey Mehlman, and Elisabeth Young-Bruehl in assessing the lasting impact and contemporary significance of Pontigny-en- Amérique. Rachel Bespaloff, a tragic figure who wrote a major work on the Iliad, is restored to her rightful place beside Arendt and Simone Weil. Anyone interested in the intellectual resistance of Francophone intellectuals and artists, and the inspiring support from such American figures as Stevens and Moore, will want to read this pioneering work of scholarship and historical re-creation.
|
