Paul Bénichou

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Paul Bénichou (born September 19, 1908 in Tlemcen , † May 14, 2001 in Paris ) was a French Romance studies and literary scholar.

life and work

Bénichou came from a family of Algerian Sephardim . As a student at the lycée d' Oran , he won the Concours général for translation into Latin; after completing his baccalaureate (1924) he went to Paris, attended the Lycée Louis-le-Grand in the preparatory class for the Ecole normal supérieure , where he studied from 1926 to 1930; In 1930 he passed the Agrégation and was then a high school teacher.

During the Second World War, he fled the German extermination of Jews (after being released and having a precarious existence with his family in Lyon) to Argentina in 1942 and taught at the Institut français in Buenos Aires (headed by Roger Caillois ). He became friends with Jorge Luis Borges . In 1949 he returned to Paris and taught at the Lycée Condorcet until 1958 . Since the manuscript of his most famous book (Morales du grand siècle) had not been accepted as Thèse by the Sorbonne in 1946, the French university remained closed to him. Instead, he taught one semester annually at Harvard University from 1958 to 1979 with overwhelming success . In 1976 he was accepted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences .

Paul Bénichou was married to Gina Labin-Bénichou, father of Sylvia Roubaud-Bénichou (* 1935), father-in-law of Jacques Roubaud and grandfather of Laurence Roubaud.

Works

  • (Ed.) Romancero judeo-español de Marruecos, Buenos Aires 1946, Madrid 1968
  • Morales du grand siècle, Paris 1948, 1967, 1988, 1997 (English: Man and Ethics. Studies in French Classicism, Garden City, NY 1971; Italian: Morali del Grand Siècle, Bologna 1990; Spanish: Imágenes del hombre en el clasicismo francés , Mexico 1984)
  • L'Écrivain et ses travaux, Paris 1967, 1993
  • Creación poética en el romancero tradicional, Madrid 1968
  • Nerval et la chanson folklorique, Paris 1970
  • Le Sacre de l'écrivain, 1750-1830. Essai sur l'avènement d'un pouvoir spirituel laïque dans la France moderne, Paris 1973, 4th edition 1996 (Spanish: La coronación del escritor, México 1981; Italian: La consacrazione dello scritore, Bologna 1993; English: The Consecration of the Writer, Lincoln, Neb./London 1999)
  • Le temps des prophètes, Paris 1977 (Italian: Il tempo dei profeti, Bologna 1997)
  • Les mages romantiques, Paris 1988
  • L'école du désenchantement. Sainte-Beuve, Nodier, Musset, Nerval, Gautier, Paris 1992
  • Selon Mallarmé, Paris 1995
  • Variétés critiques. De Corneille à Borges, Paris 1996
  • Romantismes français, 2 vols., Paris 2004 (new edition of the books from 1973, 1977, 1988 and 1992)

literature

  • Le statut de la litterature. Mélanges offerts à Paul Bénichou, ed. by Marc Fumaroli, Geneva 1982
  • Homage to Paul Bénichou, ed. by Sylvie Romanowski and Monique Bilezikian, Birmingham, AL 1994
  • Mélanges sur l'oeuvre de Paul Bénichou, ed. by Marc Fumaroli and Tzvetan Todorov, Paris 1995
  • La eterna agonía del romancero. Homenaje a Paul Bénichou, ed. by Pedro M. Piñero Ramírez, Sevilla 2001
  • Patrick Kéchichian in: Le Monde May 17, 2001, p. 33
  • Le statut de l'écrivain. Autour de Paul Bénichou, in: Cahiers de l'Association internationale des études françaises 56, 2004, pp. 197–303

Interviews

  • Littérature et critique: Paul Bénichou. Entretien avec Tzvetan Todorov, in: Le Débat 31, September 1984, pp. 53–81 (also in: T. Todorov, Critique de la critique. Un Roman d'apprentissage, Paris 1984, pp. 143–77, English in: T. Todorov, Literature and Its Theorists. A Personal View of Twentieth-Century Criticism)
  • Parcours de l'écrivain. Entretien avec Paul Bénichou, in: Le Débat 54, March – April 1989, pp. 24–32 (also in: Mélanges sur l'oeuvre de Paul Bénichou, 1995, pp. 191–206)
  • Paul Bénichou. Du grand siècle au romantisme, in: Magazine littéraire 301, July – August 1992, pp. 98–104
  • L'École du désenchantement. Entretien avec Paul Bénichou, in: Esprit 192, June 1993, pp. 134-42
  • Paul Bénichou, le Champollion de Mallarmé, in: Le Nouvel Observateur February 23, 1995, pp. 82-84
  • Paul Bénichou. Sens et obscurité selon Mallarmé, in: Magazine littéraire 368, September 1998, pp. 56-60

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Bénichou, Paul
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French Romance studies and literary scholar
DATE OF BIRTH September 19, 1908
PLACE OF BIRTH Tlemcen
DATE OF DEATH May 14, 2001
Place of death Paris