Pretexts: Reflections on Literature and Morality

✍ Scribed by Andre Gide (editor)

• Publisher: Transaction Publishers
• Year: 2010
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 355
• Edition: 1
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

Most of Andre Gide's richly-varied literary output has long been available to American readers. Only one aspect of his protean career has been lacking in translation: the essays, the publication of which will go far to explain why Gide holds in France such high rank as a critic. Many of the essays in Pretexts: Reflections on Literature and Morality were provoked by events in the cultural and political world of twentieth-century France, a turbulent setting that produced a lasting literature. These essays are vintage Gide, informed by his characteristic spirit―his hard brilliance, pointed honesty, and the enduring relevance of his concerns.

Readers of his Journals will be prepared for the style, intelligence, and marksmanship that Gide brings to bear in these forty-two articles on life as well as on letters. His range, as always, is broad: a long and moving memoir of his encounters with Oscar Wilde; a series of combats against reactionary nationalists and self-appointed purifiers of morals; estimates of Mallarme, Baudelaire, Proust, Gautier, and Valery, among others; letters to Jacques Riviere, Jean Cocteau, and Francis Jammes; and general essays on art, literature, the theater, and politics.

Justin O'Brien, famous for his studies in modern French literature, has written that Gide is "related to La Fontaine and Racine by his essential conciseness and crystalline style, to Montaigne and Goethe by his inquiring mind which reconciled unrest and serenity, to Baudelaire by his lucid, prophetic criticism." O'Brien, who has done so much to bring contemporary French literature to America, supervised the translations in Pretexts: Reflections on Literature and Morality, prepared several of them himself, and contributes an informative general introduction and additional commentary to preface the various sections of this major book.

✦ Table of Contents

Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Pretexts
Table of Contents
Introduction
Four Lectures
Concerning Influence in Literature
The Limits of Art
The Importance of the Public
The Evolution of the Theater
The Barrès Problem
Apropos of “Les Dèracinès”
The Poplar Tree Quarrel
Normandy and Bas-Languedoc
I
II
Imaginary Interviews from “L' Ermitage”
Letter to M. Edouard Ducotè
Second Interview
[Third Interview]
Nationalism and Literature
Concerning an Inquiry of “La Phalange”
Second Article
I
II
License, Moral Depravityy and Senator Bèrenger’s Declarations
In Memoriam
Stèphane Mallarmè
Oscar Wilde
I
II
III
IV
V
Baudelaire and M. Faguet
Political Essays
Reflections on Germany
The Future of Europe
Notes to Angèle
Reply to an Inquiry of “La Renaissance” on Classicism
Classicism
Classicism
Marcel Proust
“La Nouvelle Revue Françhise”
“La Nouvelle Revue Françhise”
Maurice Barrès
DISCOURS À L ’ ACADÉMIE
LES DÉRACINÉS
LES AMITIÉS FRANÇAISES
SCÉNES ET DOCTRINES DU NATIONALISME
AU SERVICE DE L'ALLEMAGNE
PASCAL
L'APPEL AU SOLDAT
LE VOYAGE DE SPARTE
Open Letters
To Jacques Rivière
To Jean Cocteau
To Francis Jammes
Thoughts on Greek Mythology
FRAGMENTS OF 'THE TREATISE ON THE DIOSCURI'
I
II
Conversation with a German Several Years Before the War
The Ten French Novels
Thèophile Gautier
Prefaces
To the “Fleurs du Mal”
To “Armance”
To “The Queen of Spades”
Upon Rereading “(Les Plaisirs et les Jours” After the Death of Marcel Proust
Paul Valèry
Dada
Portraits and Aphorisms
Characters
An Unprejudiced Mind
Index