Roger Shattuck: The Banquet Years: The Origins of the Avant-Garde in France, 1885 to World War I., Rev. ed. (1955/1968)

In this book Roger Shattuck portrays the cultural bohemia of turn-of-the-century Paris who carried the arts into a period of renewal and accomplishment, and laid the ground-work for Dada and Surrealism.

“…Then came the idea–a kind of gambler’s hunch–that the trio Rousseau-Satie-Apollinaire represented several significant aspects of the period and could reveal them better than any single figure. The idea would not die. [..] Jarry had forced his way into the group and established himself close to the center of things. He helped clarify my underlying subject: how the fluid state known as bohemia, a cultural underground smacking of failure and fraud, crystallized for a few decades into a self-conscious avant-garde that carried the arts into a period of astonishingly varied renewal and accomplishment. [..] An enormous amount has been written on this era and these men since the first edition of this book in 1958. I have taken account of some of it by changing those passages where new facts have come to light.” (from the Preface to this edition)

First published in 1955
Publisher Vintage Books, 1968
397 pages

Review (Alfred Kazin, The Reporter, 1958)
Review (Sidney Tillim, College Art Journal, 1959)
Review (Justin O’Brien, The Saturday Review, 1958)

PDF (115 MB, no OCR)

Simone de Beauvoir: The Mandarins (1954–) [EN, ES, RU]

In her famous novel, The Mandarins, Simone de Beauvoir takes an unflinching look at Parisian intellectual society at the end of World War II. In fictionally relating the stories of those around her – Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Arthur Koestler, Nelson Algren – de Beauvoir dissects the emotional and philosophical currents of her time. At once an engrossing drama and an intriguing political tale, The Mandarins is the emotional odyssey of a woman torn between her inner desires and her public life.

First published in French as Les Mandarins, Gallimard, 1954

English edition
Translated by Leonard M. Friedman
First published in English in 1956
Publisher Harper, London, 2005
With an Introduction by Doris Lessing
ISBN 0007203942

Wikipedia
Publisher (EN)

The Mandarins (English, trans. Leonard M. Friedman, 1956/2005, EPUB)
Los Mandarines (Spanish, PDF’d HTML)
Мандарины (Russian, trans. Наталья Полторацкая and Нина Световидова, 2005)

François Cusset: French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States (2003–) [FR, EN]

“During the last three decades of the twentieth century, a disparate group of radical French thinkers achieved an improbable level of influence and fame in the United States. Compared by at least one journalist to the British rock ‘n’ roll invasion, the arrival of works by Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard, Gilles Deleuze, and Félix Guattari on American shores in the late 1970s and 1980s caused a sensation.

Outside the academy, “French theory” had a profound impact on the era’s emerging identity politics while also becoming, in the 1980s, the target of right-wing propagandists. At the same time in academic departments across the country, their poststructuralist form of radical suspicion transformed disciplines from literature to anthropology to architecture. By the 1990s, French theory was woven deeply into America’s cultural and intellectual fabric.

French Theory is the first comprehensive account of the American fortunes of these unlikely philosophical celebrities. François Cusset looks at why America proved to be such fertile ground for French theory, how such demanding writings could become so widely influential, and the peculiarly American readings of these works. Reveling in the gossipy history, Cusset also provides a lively exploration of the many provocative critical practices inspired by French theory. Ultimately, he dares to shine a bright light on the exultation of these thinkers to assess the relevance of critical theory to social and political activism today—showing, finally, how French theory has become inextricably bound with American life.”

Publisher La Découverte, Paris, 2003
ISBN 2707146730
373 pages

English edition
Translated by Jeff Fort, With Josephine Berganza and Marlon Jones
Publisher University of Minnesota Press, 2008
ISBN 0816647321, 9780816647323
388 pages

Reviews: Jennifer Ferng (Leonardo), Juliet J. Fall (Foucault Studies), Ethan Kleinberg (NPDR), Bridie Lonie (Junctures, FR).

Publisher (FR)
Publisher (EN)

French Theory: Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze & Cie et les mutations de la vie intellectuelle aux États-Unis. (French)
French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States. (English)