Background
Brombert, Victor Henri was born on November 11, 1923 in Germany. Came to the United States, 1941, naturalized, 1943. Son of Jacques and Vera Brombert.
(Prentice-Hall Spectrum, 1962, Good., Text clean. Light so...)
Prentice-Hall Spectrum, 1962, Good., Text clean. Light soiling to top edge. Series: Twentieth Century Views. Literary Criticism, 20th Century Views, Stendhal Out-of-print and antiquarian booksellers since 1933. We pack and ship with care.
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( "Prison haunts our civilization," writes Victor Bromber...)
"Prison haunts our civilization," writes Victor Brombert. "Object of fear, it is also a subject of poetic reverie." Focusing on French literature of the Romantic era, the author probes the manifold significance of imprisonment as symbol and metaphor of the human condition. His thematic exploration draws on a constellation of writers ranging from the Platonic and Christian traditions to the Existentialist generation. Professor Brombert points out that nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature endowed the prison image with unusual prestige, and he examines the historical and social reasons. After considering the influence of Pascal and of the myth of the Bastille, he closely analyzes the work of Borel, Stendhal, Victor Hugo, Nerval, Baudelaire, Huysmans, and Sartre, with excursions into texts by Byron, Dostoevsky, Kafka, Solzhenitsyn, Sade, and others. His approach reflects a concern with the interaction of literature, historiography, and popular myth. This imaginative treatment deepens our understanding of Romanticism and its favored themes. It offers fresh thoughts as well about modern man's dialectical tensions between oppression and inner freedom, fate and revolt, and the awareness of the finite and the longing for infinity. A wide-ranging conclusion speculates about the future of the prison theme in a world that has been threatened by extermination camps. Originally published in 1978. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
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( Victor Brombert is an unrivaled interpreter of French ...)
Victor Brombert is an unrivaled interpreter of French literature; and the writers he considers in this latest book are ones with whom he has a long acqualntance. These essays--eleven of them appearing in English for the first time and some totally new--give us an acute analysis of the major figures of the nineteenth century and a splendid lesson in criticism. Brombert shows how a text works--its structure and narrative devices, and the symbolic function of characters, episodes, words--and he highlights the distinctive postures and styles of each writer. He gives us a sense of the hidden inner text as well as the techniques writers have devised to lead their readers to the discovery of what is hidden. With wonderful subtlety he unravels the reader's participatory response, whether it be Hugo reading Shakespeare, Sartre reading Hugo, Stendhal reading Rousseau, T. S. Eliot misreading Baudelaire, or Baudelaire, Balzac, and Flaubert reading their own sensibilities. This book is a sterling example of the finest kind of literary criticism--wise, intelligent, responsive, sympathetic--that reveals central aspects of the creative process and returns the reader joyfully to the texts themselves.
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( "A beautifully cadenced work of art―it will remind some...)
"A beautifully cadenced work of art―it will remind some readers of Nabokov's classic Speak, Memory."―Joyce Carol Oates Paris in the 1930s―melancholy, erotic, intensely politicized―provides the poetic beginning for this remarkable autobiography by one of America's most renowned literary scholars. In Trains of Thought Victor Brombert recaptures the story of his youth in a Proustian reverie, recalling, with a rare combination of humor and tenderness, his childhood in France, his family's escape to America during the Vichy regime, his experiences in the U.S. Army from the invasion of Normandy to the occupation of Berlin, and his discovery of his scholarly vocation. In shimmering prose, Brombert evokes his upbringing in Paris's upper-middle-class 16th arrondissement, a world where "the sweetness of things" masked the class tensions and political troubles that threatened the stability of the French democracy. Using the train as a metaphor to describe his personal journey, Brombert recalls his boyhood enchantment with railway travel―even imagining that he had been conceived on a sleeper. But the young Brombert sensed that "the poetry of the railroad also had its darker side, for there was the turmoil of departures, the terror . . . of being pursued by a gigantic locomotive, the nightmare of derailments, or of being trapped in a tunnel." With time, Brombert became acutely aware of the grimmer aspects of life around him―the death of his sister, Nora, on an operating table, the tragic disappearance of his boyhood love, Dany, with her infant child, and the mounting cries of "Sale Juif," or "dirty Jew," that grew from a whisper into a thundering din as the decade drew to a close. The invasion of May 1940 dispelled the optimistic belief, shared by most of the French nation, that the horrors that had descended on Germany could never happen to them. The family was forced to flee from Paris, first to Nice, then to Spain, and finally across the Atlantic on a banana freighter to America. Discovering the excitement of New York, Brombert nonetheless hoped to return to France in an American uniform once the United States entered the war. He joined the U.S. Army in 1943, and soon found himself with General Patton's old "Hell-on-Wheels" division at Omaha Beach, then in Paris at the time of its liberation, and later at the Battle of the Bulge. The final chapter concludes with Brombert's return to America, his enrollment at Yale University, and the beginning of a literary voyage whose origins are poignantly captured in this coming-of-age story. Trains of Thought is a virtuosic accomplishment, and a memoir that is likely to become a classic account of both memory and experience.
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(Victor Brombert reassesses in a modern perspective the po...)
Victor Brombert reassesses in a modern perspective the power and originality of Hugo's work, and provides a new interpretation of Hugo's narrative art as well as a synthesis of his poetic and moral vision. The twenty-eight drawings by Hugo reproduced in this book are further testimony to the visionary nature of Hugo's imagination.
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Brombert, Victor Henri was born on November 11, 1923 in Germany. Came to the United States, 1941, naturalized, 1943. Son of Jacques and Vera Brombert.
Bachelor, Yale University, 1948. Master of Arts, Yale University, 1949. Doctor of Philosophy, Yale University, 1953.
Postgraduate, University Rome, 1951. HHD (honorary), University Chicago, 1981. HHD (honorary), University Toronto, 1997.
Faculty Yale University, New Haven, 1951-1975, from associate professor to professor, 1958-1975, Benjamin F. Barge professor Romance literature, 1969-1975, chairman department Romance languages and literature, 1964-1973. Henry Putnam university professor romance and comparative literature Princeton (New Jersey) University, 1975—1999, director Christian Gauss seminars in criticism, 1984-1994, chairman Council Humanities, 1989-1994. Summer professor Middlebury College, 1951-1953, Institut d'Etudes Françaises, Avignon, 1962, 64, 73, University Colorado, 1965.
Christian Gauss Seminar in criticism Princeton University, 1964. Visiting professor Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa, Italy, 1972, University California, 1978, Johns Hopkins University, 1979, Columbia University, 1980, New York University, 1980-1981, University Puerto Rico, 1983, 84, University Bologna, Italy, 1984, Yale University, 1985. Phi Beta Kappa visiting scholar, 1986-1987, 89-90.
Lecturer Alliance Française, humanities University Kansas, 1966. Lecturer Collège de France, 1991. Member Fulbright screening committee, 1965.
Director fellowships in residence National Endowment of the Humanities, Princeton University, 1975-1976, director summer seminar, 1979, 82, 84, 86, 88. Advisory committee for humanities Library. of Congress, 1976. Member Yale University Council, 1977-1983.
Educational advisory board Guggenheim Foundation, 1982–2005.
(Victor Brombert reassesses in a modern perspective the po...)
( Victor Brombert is an unrivaled interpreter of French ...)
( "A beautifully cadenced work of art―it will remind some...)
(Literary Studies, Philosophy, French Literature & Studies...)
( "Prison haunts our civilization," writes Victor Bromber...)
(Prentice-Hall Spectrum, 1962, Good., Text clean. Light so...)
Served with Military Intelligence Army of the United States, 1943-1945. Fellow American Academy Arts and Sciences. Member Modern Language Association (editorial advisory communications 1979-1983, president 1989), American Association Teachers French, American Comparative Literature Association, American Philosophical Society, Society des Etudes Françaises, Society des Etudes Romantiques, Academy Literature Studies (president 1983), Society d'Histoire Littéraire de la France, Society University per gli Studi di Lingua e Letteratura Francese, Institute Romance Studies, Elizabethan Club (president 1968-1970), Yale Club, Phi Beta Kappa.
Married Beth Anne Archer, June 18, 1950. Children: Lauren Nora, Marc Alexis.