Lawrence D. Kritzman (French and Comp Lit, Dartmouth)

Speaker(s): Lawrence Kritzman

"Death Sentences: Malraux's Anti-Memoires II"
 
In the Antimémoires Malraux attempts to overcome mortality and death by memorializing the ephemeral through the artifice of writing. The rhetoric of the self-portrait takes the form of a historical narrative in which the textual archive affords Malraux a reprieve by effacing the inherent status of contingency. The Lazare narrative becomes a metaphor for survival. The Antimemoires is a veritable cultural mausoleum that sublates the implicit negation of death and allows Malraux to become more than a conscience without memory.
 
Lawrence D. Kritzman is Professor of French and Comparative Literature, the John D. Willard Professor of French and Oratory, Director of the Institute of European Studies and Director of the Institute of French Cultural Studies at Dartmouth College. He is the editor of numerous works on a wide variety of subjects, including Michel Foucault's Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, 1977-1984 (1988), Le Signe et le texte: études sur l'écriture au XVIe siècle en France (1990), Auschwitz and After: Race, Culture, and "the Jewish Question" in France (1995), Pierre Nora's Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past (1996-1998), and The Columbia History of Twentieth-Century French Thought (2007). In addition, Prof. Kritzman is the author of several articles and books, including Destruction/Decouverte: le fonctionnement de la rhetorique dans les Essais de Montaigne (1980),The Rhetoric of Sexuality and the Literature of the French Renaissance (1991) and The Fabulous Imagination: On Montaigne's Essays (2009). The recipient of the Légion d'Honneur by the President of France for his many contributions to French culture, he has been interviewed by French Culture, Le Monde, Libération, Le Figaro, the International New York Times, and others. Prof. Kritzman is currently completing a project on writing and mortality in post-1950 French texts.