In this Book
- Artists, Intellectuals, and World War II: The Pontigny Encounters at Mount Holyoke College, 1942-1944
- Book
- 2006
- Published by: University of Massachusetts Press
summary
Sixty years ago, at the height of World War II, an extraordinary series of gatherings took place at Mount Holyoke College in western Massachusetts. During the summers of 1942–1944, leading Europeanfigures in the arts and sciences met at the college with their American counterparts for urgent conversations about the future of human civilization in a precarious world.
Two Sorbonne professors, the distinguished medievalist Gustave Cohen and the existentialist philosopher Jean Wahl, organized these “Pontigny” sessions, named after an abbey in Burgundy where similar symposia had been held in the decades before the war. Among the participants—many of whom were Jewish or had Jewish backgrounds—were the philosophers Hannah Arendt and Rachel Bespaloff, the poets Marianne Moore and Wallace Stevens, the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss and the linguist Roman Jakobson, and the painters Marc Chagall and Robert Motherwell.
In this collection of original essays, Stanley Cavell and Jacques Derrida lead an international group of scholars—including Jed Perl, Mary Ann Caws, Jeffrey Mehlman, and Elisabeth Young-Bruehl—in assessing the lasting impact and contemporary significance of Pontigny-en- Amérique. Rachel Bespaloff, a tragicfigure who wrote a major work on the Iliad, is restored to her rightful place beside Arendt and Simone Weil. Anyone interested in the “intellectual resistance” of Francophone intellectuals and artists, and the inspiring support from such Americanfigures as Stevens and Moore, will want to read this pioneering work of scholarship and historical re-creation.
Table of Contents
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- Acknowledgments
- p. xiii
- Part I: A Hundred Years of Pontigny
- pp. 15-55
- Pontigny-en-Am
- pp. 19-36
- The Vision of Helen Patch
- pp. 37-42
- The OSS Pays a Visit
- pp. 43-45
- Part II: Poetry and Philosophy
- pp. 57-100
- Postscript: Response to Mehlman
- pp. 84-88
- Part III: Art and Artists
- pp. 101-135
- Romantic Reverberations
- pp. 105-113
- Part IV: Creativity and Crisis
- pp. 137-201
- Medievalism and Pontigny
- pp. 141-144
- Part V: Conversations in Exile
- pp. 203-245
- A Tale of Two Iliads
- pp. 207-219
- Part VI: Remembering Rachel Bespaloff
- pp. 247-277
- Rediscovering Rachel Bespaloff
- pp. 260-263
- Searching for Rachel Bespaloff
- pp. 264-267
- Blend and Belong
- pp. 268-270
- Memories of Rachel Bespaloff
- pp. 271-272
- Pauvre Rachel
- pp. 273-277
- Conclusion: Encounters of Hope
- pp. 279-282
- Contributors
- pp. 283-286
Additional Information
ISBN
9781613760680
Related ISBN(s)
9781558495302
MARC Record
OCLC
667103294
Pages
352
Launched on MUSE
2012-01-01
Language
English
Open Access
No