Introduction: Marc Angenot and the Scandal of History

This article assesses the life and work of Marc Angenot by tracing the series of "red threads" that run through the huge corpus of his work. Along the way, Barsky provides an overview of Angenot's theories, which bear upon philology, history, literary theory, linguistics, semiotics, and literature. He also assesses the ways in which Angenot's uniquely European classical training has (and should have) intersected with a North American intellectual culture, while offering a roadmap for understanding the theoretical and methodological implications of an approach that is nearly as daunting as the "social discourse" and the "grand narratives" it attempts to describe.