Search -
Extreme-Occident : French Intellectuals and America
ExtremeOccident French Intellectuals and America Author:Jean-Philippe Mathy What does "America" mean to French intellectuals? Is — it a postmodern ideal situated beyond history and metaphysics? — A source of spiritual decadence that threatens the European — tradition? Or is it "Extrême-Occident," the Far — Western site that gives historical reality to the utopias of — the Renaissance and the Enlightenment? — Jean-Philip... more »pe Mathy offers the first systematic
examination of French texts that address the question of
America. He shows how prominent French intellectuals have
represented America as myth and metaphor, covering the entire
ideological spectrum from Maurras to Duhamel, and from Sartre
to Aron. The texts themselves range from novels and poems to
travel narratives and philosophical essays by Claudel, Sartre,
de Beauvoir, Lyotard, Baudrillard, Kristeva, and many others.
Mathy deftly situates these discourses on America
against the background of French intellectual and political
history since 1789. The judgments on American culture that
originate in France, he contends, are also statements about
France itself. Widespread condemnation of American
materialism and pragmatism cuts across deep ideological and
political divides in France, primarily because French
intellectuals still operate within a framework of critical
and aesthetic models born in the late Middle Ages and the
Renaissance and elaborated in the age of French classicism.
Mathy engages issues central to interpreting the
American experience, such as the current controversies over
multiculturalism and Eurocentrism. Although Mathy deals
mainly with French authors, he does not limit himself to
them. Rather, he uses a comparative, cross-cultural approach
that also takes in accounts of America by Nietzsche,
Heidegger, Junger, Gramsci, and other Europeans, as well as
American self-interpretations from Emerson and Dewey to
Cornel West and Christopher Lasch.
Because debates on American modernity have played a
crucial intellectual role in France, Extrême-
Occident is a major contribution to modern French cultural
history. It will be essential reading for anyone wishing to
understand the main currents of twentieth-century French