French Lessons: A Memoir
Brilliantly uniting the personal and the critical, French Lessons is a powerful autobiographical experiment. It tells the story of an American woman escaping into the French language and of a scholar and teacher coming to grips with her history of learning. Kaplan begins with a distinctly American quest for an imaginary France of the intelligence. But soon her infatuation with all things French comes up against the dark, unimagined recesses of French political and cultural life.\ The daughter...
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Brilliantly uniting the personal and the critical, French Lessons is a powerful autobiographical experiment. It tells the story of an American woman escaping into the French language and of a scholar and teacher coming to grips with her history of learning. Kaplan begins with a distinctly American quest for an imaginary France of the intelligence. But soon her infatuation with all things French comes up against the dark, unimagined recesses of French political and cultural life.The daughter of a Jewish lawyer who prosecuted Nazi war criminals at Nuremburg, Kaplan grew up in the 1960s in the Midwest. After her father's death when she was seven, French became her way of "leaving home" and finding herself in another language and culture. In spare, midwestern prose, by turns intimate and wry, Kaplan describes how, as a student in a Swiss boarding school and later in a junior year abroad in Bordeaux, she passionately sought the French "r," attentively honed her accent, and learned the idioms of her French lover.When, as a graduate student, her passion for French culture turned to the elegance and sophistication of its intellectual life, she found herself drawn to the language and style of the novelist Louis-Ferdinand Celine. At the same time she was repulsed by his anti-Semitism. At Yale in the late 70s, during the heyday of deconstruction she chose to transgress its apolitical purity and work on a subject "that made history impossible to ignore:" French fascist intellectuals. Kaplan's discussion of the "de Man affair" — the discovery that her brilliant and charismatic Yale professor had written compromising articles for the pro-Nazi Belgian press—and her personal account of the paradoxes of deconstruction are among the most compelling available on this subject.French Lessons belongs in the company of Sartre's Words and the memoirs of Nathalie Sarraute, Annie Ernaux, and Eva Hoffman. No book so engrossingly conveys both the excitement of learning and the moral dilemmas of the intellectual life. Booknews Kaplan teaches French literature at Duke University. She traces her emotional and intellectual entanglement with French and France, teasing out the sources of her fascination in her personal history and that of her parents, and interweaving personal and critical experiences in her academic career and intellectual development. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
Part One. Before I Knew FrenchFirst Words The Last Summer at Wildhurst Road Loss LeavingPart Two. Getting ItBoarding School in Switzerland Spring Break in France Coming HomePart Three. Getting It RightAndréMicheline CélinePart Four. RevisionsIn Search of the French "R"Tenses Guy, de Man, and Me The Trouble with Edna The Interview Returning Home Afterwards Note on the Text Acknowledgment
\ BooknewsKaplan teaches French literature at Duke University. She traces her emotional and intellectual entanglement with French and France, teasing out the sources of her fascination in her personal history and that of her parents, and interweaving personal and critical experiences in her academic career and intellectual development. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)\ \
