{"product_id":"french-lessons-a-memoir-9780226424194","title":"French Lessons: A Memoir","description":"\u003cp\u003eBrilliantly uniting the personal and the critical  French Lessons is a powerful autobiographical experiment. It tells the story of an American woman escaping into the French language and of a scholar and teacher coming to grips with her history of learning. Kaplan begins with a distinctly American quest for an imaginary France of the intelligence. But soon her infatuation with all things French comes up against the dark  unimagined recesses of French political and cultural life.  The daughter of a Jewish lawyer who prosecuted Nazi war criminals at Nuremburg  Kaplan grew up in the 1960s in the Midwest. After her fathers death when she was seven  French became her way of \"leaving home\" and finding herself in another language and culture. In spare  midwestern prose  by turns intimate and wry  Kaplan describes how  as a student in a Swiss boarding school and later in a junior year abroad in Bordeaux  she passionately sought the French \"r \" attentively honed her accent  and learned the idioms of her French lover.  When  as a graduate student  her passion for French culture turned to the elegance and sophistication of its intellectual life  she found herself drawn to the language and style of the novelist Louis-Ferdinand Celine. At the same time she was repulsed by his anti-Semitism. At Yale in the late 70s  during the heyday of deconstruction she chose to transgress its apolitical purity and work on a subject \"that made history impossible to ignore:\" French fascist intellectuals. Kaplans discussion of the \"de Man affair\"  the discovery that her brilliant and charismatic Yale professor had written compromising articles for the pro-Nazi Belgian pressand her personal account of the paradoxes of deconstruction are among the most compelling available on this subject.  French Lessons belongs in the company of Sartres Words and the memoirs of Nathalie Sarraute  Annie Ernaux  and Eva Hoffman. No book so engrossingly conveys both the excitement of learning and the moral dilemmas of the intellectual life.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"My Store","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":67615787024437,"sku":"ByrdShop_0226424197","price":65.92,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0627\/8139\/0901\/files\/9780226424194.jpg?v=1791190924","url":"https:\/\/atxbooks.com\/products\/french-lessons-a-memoir-9780226424194","provider":"ATX Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}