The Pensive Citadel.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Brombert, Victor, 1923-2024.

Contributor:

Wampole, Christy.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Brombert, Victor, 1923-2024.

Brombert, Victor.

College teachers--United States--Biography.

College teachers.

French literature--History and criticism.

French literature.

French teachers--United States--Biography.

French teachers.

Literary historians--United States--Biography.

Literary historians.

Literature teachers--United States--Biography.

Literature teachers.

Literature--History and criticism.

Literature.

Genre:

Essays.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (173 pages)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2023.

Summary:

A reflective volume of essays on literature and literary study from a storied professor. In The Pensive Citadel, Victor Brombert looks back on a lifetime of learning within a university world greatly altered since he entered Yale on the GI Bill in the 1940s. Yet for all that has changed, much of Brombert's long experience as a reader and teacher is richly familiar: the rewards of rereading, the joy of learning from students, and most of all the insight to be found in engaging works of literature. The essays gathered here range from meditations on laughter and jealousy to new appreciations of Brombert's lifelong companions Shakespeare, Montaigne, Voltaire, and Stendhal. A veteran of D-day and the Battle of the Bulge who witnessed history's worst nightmares firsthand, Brombert nevertheless approaches literature with a lightness of spirit, making the case for intellectual mobility and openness to change. The Pensive Citadel is a celebration of a life lived in literary study, and of what can be learned from attending to the works that form one's cultural heritage.

Contents:

Intro

Contents

Foreword by Christy Wampole

Preface

Part I. In Nostalgia

1. The Pensive Citadel

2. Between Two Worlds

3. What Existentialism Meant to Us

4. Cleopatra at Yale

5. "Brombingo!"-Learning from Students

Part II. The Ludic Mode

6. The Paradox of Laughter

7. In Praise of Jealousy?

8. On Rereading

Part III. The French Connection

9. Lessons of Montaigne

10. The Audacities of Molière's Don Juan

11. The Bitterness of Candide

12. Encounters with Monsieur Beyle

13. Baudelaire: Visions of Paris

14. The Year of the Eiffel Tower

15. Malraux and the World of Violence

Part IV. The Exit

16. The Permanent Sabbatical

Acknowledgments

Index.

Notes:

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

ISBN:

9780226828671

0226828670

OCLC:

1396063472