From an eminent scholar, a spirited introduction to one of the great polymaths in the history of Europe.

Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) is best known in the English-speaking world for his contributions to mathematics and physics, with both a triangle and a law in fluid mechanics named after him. Meanwhile, the classic film My Night at Maud's popularized Pascal's wager, an invitation to faith that has inspired generations of theologians. Despite the immensity of his reputation, few read him outside French schools. In A Summer with Pascal, celebrated literary critic Antoine Compagnon opens our minds to a figure somehow both towering and ignored.

Compagnon provides a bird's-eye view of Pascal's life and significance, making this volume an ideal introduction. Still, scholars and neophytes alike will profit greatly from his masterful readings of the Pensées--a cornerstone of Western philosophy--and the Provincial Letters, in which Pascal advanced wry theological critiques of his contemporaries. The concise, taut chapters build upon one another, easing into writings often thought to be forbidding and dour. With Compagnon as our guide, these works are not just accessible but enchanting.

A Summer with Pascal brings the early modern thinker to life in the present. In an age of profound existential doubt and assaults on truth and reason, in which religion and science are so often crudely opposed, Pascal's sophisticated commitment to both challenges us to meet the world with true intellectual vigor.

Marcel Proust once wrote, There is no longer anybody, not even myself, since I cannot leave my bed, who will go along the Rue du Repos to visit the little Jewish cemetery where my grandfather, following a custom that he never understood, went for so many years to lay a stone on his parents' grave. Investigating the origin and significance of this statement, Antoine Compagnon offers new insight into the great author's underappreciated Jewish side.

Compagnon traces Proust's ties to the French Jewish community, examining his relations with his mother's successful and assimilated family, the Weils. He explores how French Jews read and responded to Proust's masterpiece In Search of Lost Time in the 1920s and 1930s. Challenging contemporary critics who perceive self-hatred or even antisemitism in Proust's work, Compagnon shows that many Jewish intellectuals and young Zionists admired and vigorously debated the novel, some seeing it as a source for pride in their Jewish identity. He also considers Proust's portrayal of homosexuality and how it relates to notions of Jewishness. A work of remarkable erudition and deep research, Proust, a Jewish Way brings to light the vanished world of Proust's first Jewish readers and shows how it can illuminate our reading of the great novelist today.

Michel de Montaigne embodies the Humanist ideal. Curious, measured, contemplative yet not unworldly, witty, free of prejudice, and urbane. But what does Montaigne have to tell us about how to think and live today? In forty short, erudite and lively chapters written over a single summer, Antoine Compagnon seeks answers to that question.

In A Summer with Montaigne, Compagnon invites his readers to join him as he strolls through Montaigne's key contributions to our understanding of what is good and worthwhile in life. This engaging book, then, serves as both an introduction to Montaigne for readers unfamiliar with his work and a refresher for those who are already acquainted with his unique brilliance, vitality, and timeliness. Montaigne's Essays deal with themes that remain relevant today, from the problems posed by religion, war, power and friendship to the absurdity of our fixations and peccadillos. As accompanies readers through the Essays, Compagnon never pontificates and is never austere, rather he approaches Montaigne with a sense of humor, admiration, and joy.

Marcel Proust once wrote, There is no longer anybody, not even myself, since I cannot leave my bed, who will go along the Rue du Repos to visit the little Jewish cemetery where my grandfather, following a custom that he never understood, went for so many years to lay a stone on his parents' grave. Investigating the origin and significance of this statement, Antoine Compagnon offers new insight into the great author's underappreciated Jewish side.

Compagnon traces Proust's ties to the French Jewish community, examining his relations with his mother's successful and assimilated family, the Weils. He explores how French Jews read and responded to Proust's masterpiece In Search of Lost Time in the 1920s and 1930s. Challenging contemporary critics who perceive self-hatred or even antisemitism in Proust's work, Compagnon shows that many Jewish intellectuals and young Zionists admired and vigorously debated the novel, some seeing it as a source for pride in their Jewish identity. He also considers Proust's portrayal of homosexuality and how it relates to notions of Jewishness. A work of remarkable erudition and deep research, Proust, a Jewish Way brings to light the vanished world of Proust's first Jewish readers and shows how it can illuminate our reading of the great novelist today.

Was Marcel Proust the last of the great classics or the first of the revolutionaries? Proust was thirty in 1901 and he died in 1922, living longer in the nineteenth century than he did in the twentieth. His work, especially the monumental sixteen-volume novel Remembrance of Things Past, draws its aesthetic affinities from the century of Baudelaire, Wagner, and Ruskin but at the same time escapes late nineteenth-century decadent aestheticism to reach toward an early twentieth-century modernist stance.

An engaging introduction to contemporary debates in literary theory

In the late twentieth century, the common sense approach to literature was deemed naïve. Roland Barthes proclaimed the death of the author, and Hillis Miller declared that all interpretation is theoretical. In many a literature department, graduate students spent far more time on Derrida and Foucault than on Shakespeare and Milton. Despite this, common sense approaches to literature--including the belief that literature represents reality and authorial intentions matter--have resisted theory with tenacity. As a result, argues Antoine Compagnon, theorists have gone to extremes, boxed themselves into paradoxes, and distanced others from their ideas. Eloquently assessing the accomplishments and failings of literary theory, Compagnon ultimately defends the methods and goals of a theoretical commitment tempered by the wisdom of common sense.

The book is organized not by school of thought but around seven central questions: literariness, the author, the world, the reader, style, history, and value. What makes a work literature? Does fiction imitate reality? Is the reader present in the text? What constitutes style? Is the context in which a work is written important to its apprehension? Are literary values universal?

As he examines how theory has wrestled these themes, Compagnon establishes not a simple middle-ground but a state of productive tension between high theory and common sense. The result is a book that will be met with both controversy and sighs of relief.

Le College de France se definit comme le lieu de la science en voie de se faire. Rejetant tout partage disciplinaire fixe, il prone l'adequation de ses enseignements au renouvellement des savoirs. Mais ce qui apparait comme une libre transformation est aussi l'expression d'une politique institutionnelle. Le choix d'un intitule de chaire, la designation d'un titulaire resultent de l'etat de la science et d'un contexte academique, politique et social. La reconduction d'une chaire revient a affirmer qu'une discipline merite d'etre enseignee; la suppression d'une autre signifie que celle-ci n'a plus sa place dans le paysage scientifique. L'analyse des pratiques a l'oeuvre au College de France durant ses cinq siecles d'existence, revele une tension vive et persistante entre l'engagement en faveur de l'innovation et la perpetuation des traditions seculaires. Sur la base de nombreux documents inedits issus notamment des archives du College de France, cet ouvrage revisite l'autodefinition de la plus fameuse institution savante francaise et invite a reconsiderer la fabrique et le partage des savoirs dans l'enseignement et la recherche.

This treatise on modernism and postmodernism establishes that modernists' faith in the cult of novelty inevitably led to its destruction. Exploring the paradoxical nature of the modernist tradition in literature and the arts, the author considers its aesthetic and moral contradictions.