Suchergebnisse

Éclipses et résurgences de la francité en Amérique. Entre amour et désamour.

In 2008, just prior to his hundredth birthday, an immortality of sorts was conferred on the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss when his Oeuvres were published—leather-bound, gold-embossed, on Bible paper—in Gallimard's Pléiade collection. He died the following year and we are now beginning to see, for the first time, assessments of his achievement—including the two volumes under review—in a world without Lévi-Strauss. Patrick Wilcken's stylishly written biography is considerably shorter than Denis Bertholet's French biography of 2003, but is nonetheless the first in a position to take in the entire arc of the anthropologist's career—from his nineteenth-century-style expeditions to the Brazilian interior in the 1930s, via his wartime exile in New York, where the twin influences of the linguist Roman Jakobson and assorted surrealists led to the writing of a groundbreaking thesis, to the vanguard structuralist project, the international celebrity, the eventual disillusionment with modernism, the unexpected late references to Gobineau (from an antiracist ideologue), and the final years, when he claimed to feel like a "shattered hologram" and received the visit of a notoriously philistine president of France on his hundredth birthday. Wilcken steers his biography skillfully between the pitfalls of reverence and dismissiveness. It is useful, for instance, to be reminded by a skeptical John Updike that "with such a hunting license granted, parallels and homologies are easy to bag—child's play for a brain as agile as M. Lévi-Strauss" (quoted at 299). But it is equally good to learn of the frequency with which what Wilcken calls Lévi-Strauss's "hit-and-run tactics" would pay off, generating fresh perspectives (75).

Résumé La francophobie américaine ne mérite pas moins d'attention que l'antiaméricanisme en France. Cette tradition pittoresque, et chez nous méconnue, Jeffrey Mehlman, éminent critique littéraire américain, l'aborde ici par le biais des meilleurs romanciers et des comédies musicales. À qui osera dire que c'est le petit bout de la lorgnette, le médiologue répondra par le dicton fameux : Ad augusta per angusta . Ce sont les sentiers qui mènent aux sommets.

An in-depth analysis of an anti-semitic conspiracy theory, from its origins in the 20th century to its resurgence todayThe Protocols of the Elders of Zion, first published in Russia around 1905, claimed to be the captured secret protocols from the first Zionist Congress in Basel in 1897 describing a plan by the Jewish people to achieve global domination. While the document has been proven to be fake, much of it plagiarized from satirical anti-Semitic texts, it had a major impact throughout Europe during the first half of the 20th century, particularly in Germany. After World War II, the text was further denounced. Anyone who referred to it as a genuine document was seen as an ignorant hate-monger.Yet there is abundant evidence that The Protocols is resurfacing in many places. The Paranoid Apocalypse re-examines the text's popularity, investigating why it has persisted, as well as larger questions about the success of conspiracy theories even in the face of claims that they are blatantly counterfactual and irrational. It considers the medieval pre-history of The Protocols, the conditions of its success in the era of early twentieth-century secular modernity, and its post-Holocaust avatars, from the Muslim world to Walmart and Left-wing anti-American radicalism. Contributors argue that the key to The Protocols' longevity is an apocalyptic paranoia that lays the groundwork not only for the myth's popularity, but for its implementation as a vehicle for genocide and other brutal acts