With more than two hundred entries by leading intellectuals in the French- and English-speaking world, this new volume presents the authoritative guide to twentieth-century French thought. Unrivaled in its scope and depth, The Columbia History of Twentieth-Century French Thought covers and critiques the intellectual figures, movements, and publications that helped shape and define fields as diverse as history and historiography, psychoanalysis, film, literary theory, cognitive and life sciences, literary criticism, philosophy, and economics. The contributors also discuss developments in French thought on such subjects as pacifism, fashion, gastronomy, technology, and urbanism. More than just a reference volume, The Columbia History of Twentieth-Century French Thought offers original and imaginative explorations of a variety of topics. Contributors include prominent French thinkers, many of whom have played an integral role in the development of French thought, and American, British, and Canadian scholars who have been vital in the dissemination of French ideas. The book brings together such pairings as Etienne Balibar on Althusser; Jean Baudrillard on the futures of theory; Judith Butler on Hegel in France; Regis Debray on mediology; Julia Kristeva on Proust; Michael Morange on the life sciences; Paul Ricoeur on ethics; Elisabeth Roudinesco on psychoanalysis; and Roger Shattuck on humanisms. The book is divided into four parts: Movements and Currents (including all the major schools of thought, such as the Annales, deconstruction, Gaullism, negritude, the New Right, psychoanalysis, and structuralism); Themes (ideas that helped define intellectual work in the twentieth century, such as anti-Semitism, the avant-garde, everyday life, film theory, and nationalism); Intellectuals (including critical accounts of the lives and work of such figures as Aron, Barthes, de Beauvoir, Deleuze, Derrida, Foucault, Irigaray, Kristeva, Levinas, and Proust); and Dissemination (covering influential journals, television shows, radio programs, and newspapers).

Unrivaled in its scope and depth, The Columbia History of Twentieth-Century French Thought assesses the intellectual figures, movements, and publications that helped shape and define fields as diverse as history and historiography, psychoanalysis, film, literary theory, cognitive and life sciences, literary criticism, philosophy, and economics. More than two hundred entries by leading intellectuals discuss developments in French thought on such subjects as pacifism, fashion, gastronomy, technology, and urbanism. Contributors include prominent French thinkers, many of whom have played an integral role in the development of French thought, and American, British, and Canadian scholars who have been vital in the dissemination of French ideas.

About the Author
Lawrence D. Kritzman is the Pat and John Rosenwald Research Professor in the Arts and Sciences and professor of French and comparative literature at Dartmouth College. He is the author of The Rhetoric of Sexuality and the Literature of the French Renaissance and Columbia's forthcoming The Fabulous Imagination: On Montaigne's Essays. He is also the editor of the European Perspectives Series, published by Columbia University Press, and has written extensively on French intellectual thought, literature and psychoanalysis, as well as literary self-portraiture.

Reviews
Both researchers and browsers will delight in this authoritative compendium of articles on France's intellectual century. Library Journal A must for students of French intellectual history. France Magazine Massive and steady... a patchwork of colorful characters, abstract figures, dense superimpositions. France Today A highly polished piece of original scholarship. Choice [A] superb overview of its subject. -- Carlin Romano Philadelphia Inquirer The Columbia History of Twentieth-Century French Thought is a well-designed and well-executed volume. American Reference Books Annual Creative in organization, innovative in choice of themes, and unsurpassed in quality... a volume without parallel. -- Andrew Sobanet French Forum A remarkably well-designed and well-executed volume. -- Delilah R. Caldwell American Reference Books Annual


Awards
Winner of Ray and Pat Browne Book Award for a Reference Work 2006. Joint winner of Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for French and Francophone Studies, Modern Language Association 2006. Runner-up for Bronze Medal - Independent Publisher Book Award for a reference book 2007.



Book Information
ISBN 9780231107907
Author Brian Reilly
Format Paperback
Page Count 816
Imprint Columbia University Press
Publisher Columbia University Press