Laurence Wylie

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Laurence William Wylie (born November 19, 1909 in Indianapolis , † July 25, 1996 in Cambridge (Massachusetts) ) was an American anthropologist and Romance scholar. He became internationally known through the book Village in the Vaucluse .

Life

Laurence Wylie studied French at the University of Indiana and Paris and received his doctorate in 1940 from Brown University with a study on Saint-Marc Girardin . From 1947 to 1950 he studied anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania .

Wylie has taught at Simmons College in Boston and Haverford College . In 1950/51 he spent a year with his family in the Vaucluse and processed his experiences there in the community sociological study Village in the Vaucluse published in 1957 .

In 1959 he was appointed to the newly created chair of French civilization at Harvard University, where he was a member of both the social sciences and the Romance department. From 1965 to 1967 he worked as cultural attaché and chairman of the Fulbright Commission at the American embassy in Paris. In 1968 he was appointed a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences .

Village in the Vaucluse

Wylie describes everyday life in the municipality of Roussillon in the Vaucluse department in southern France . After two introductory chapters on the geography and history of the village, which is named in the book Peyrane, he first goes into the life stages of childhood, school and youth. Wylie himself taught English in the village school while his older son was in elementary school, and thus learned about the reality of the French school system. The greater part of the book is then devoted to the everyday life of adults, which is described in detail using the areas of problems and worries as well as relaxation and amusements . Wylie repeatedly succeeds in gaining interesting insights that make the book worth reading beyond its sociological content.

Dorf in der Vaucluse was first published in 1957 by Harvard University Press, further editions followed in 1964 and 1974. The complete French edition was published by Gallimard in 1968, and a German translation was first published in 1969 in the Conditio Humana series by S. Fischer Verlag . The new edition published in 1978 by Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag contains an additional chapter twenty-five years later .

Works

  • Laurence William Wylie: Saint-Marc Girardin - Bourgeois. Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press 1947.
  • Laurence Wylie: village in the Vaucluse, the everyday life of a French community. Frankfurt a. M .: Fischer 1969. (New edition Fischer paperback 1978 ISBN 3-596-26621-1 )
  • Laurence W. Wylie (Ed.): Chanzeaux. A village in Anjou. Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1966.
  • Laurence Wylie, Armand Bégué: Les Français. Englewoods Cliffs: Prentice-Hall 1970.
  • Laurence Wylie: Beaux Gestes. A Guide to French Body Talk. Cambridge (Massachusetts): The Undergraduate Press 1977. ISBN 0-525-06180-0

See also

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Wylie, Laurence
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Wylie, Laurence William (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American anthropologist and romance scholar
DATE OF BIRTH November 19, 1909
PLACE OF BIRTH Indianapolis
DATE OF DEATH July 25, 1996
Place of death Cambridge, Massachusetts