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,
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;
Régis 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, négritude, 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).