French Lessons Research Articles

The collaborator: the trial & execution of Robert Brasillach

On February 6, 1945, a 35-year-old writer and newspaper editor named Robert Brasillach was executed for treason by a firing squad. He was the only writer of any distinction to be put to death by the Liberation government during the violent days of score-settling known as the Purge. In this book, Alice Kaplan, author of the memoir French Lessons tells the story of Brasillach's rise and fall: his emergence as the golden boy of literary fascism during the 1930s, his wartime collaboration with the Nazis, his dramatic trial and his afterlife as a martyr for rightists and Holocaust revisionists. A prolific novelist and critic, Brasillach was a witty, flamboyant product of France's prestigious Ecole Normale Superieure. He was also an anti-Semite, an acerbic opponent of demnocracy, and the editor in chief of France's infamous fascist weekly Je Suis Partout. His trial and execution, carefully reconstructed in Collaborator, remain one of the most controversial episodes in the history of 20th-century France. In the charged days of January 1945 - with Paris liberated but France still at war - a monumental courtroom drama pitted a fierce government prosecutor against a florid defence lawyer for what each considered justice on both a personal and a national scale. Paris in 1945 is also the venue for Kaplan's ethical examination of the questions raised by Brasillach's trial. Was he in fact guilty of treason? Was he condemned for his denunciations of the resistance or singled out as a suspected homosexual? Was it right that he was executed when others who were directly responsible for the murder of thousands were set free? The verdict on these momentous issues was left to four jurors from the working-class suburbs of Paris, whose stories Kaplan presents here for the first time. In recreating the trial, she also uncovers more material never before published: damaging writings by Brasillach omitted from his Complete Works, and the file that Charles de Gaulle used to reach his decision not to pardon the writer.

Eye to I: the autobiography of a photographer

By turns acerbic, self-mocking, playful, even absurd, this autobiography deals with all Blumenfeld's subjects - his Jewish family, the Germans, the Vichy French, his models and New York publishers - with equal measures of wit, mockery and irony. He spares himself least of all. Born in turn-of-the-century Berlin, Blumenfeld was drafted in to serve in World War I, first as an ambulance driver (although he couldn't drive) and then as book-keeper at a field brothel, and was awarded the Iron Cross for giving his sergeant French lessons. Between the wars he was part of an avant-garde circle that included such artists as Else Lasker-Schuler and George Grosz and members of the Dada movement. During World War II, Blumenfeld was interned in a series of French camps, but eventually arrived in New York, where he found work with Vogue and Harper's Bazaar.

The Moral of My Story: Alice Kaplan's French Lessons and the Moralization of Autobiography

The Moral of My Story: Alice Kaplan's French Lessons and the Moralization of Autobiography

Equidistant Between Two Continents: Learning to Navigate Language and Legacies

Review Essays Equidistant Between Two Continents: Learning to Navigate Language and Legacies by Michelle Friedman English Department Bryn Mawr College 145 French Lessons: A Memoir, by Alice Kaplan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. 222 pp. $9.95. Dreams of an Insomniac: Jewish Feminist Essays, Speeches and Diatribes, by Irena Klepfisz. Portland, OR: Eighth Mountain Press, 1990. 256 pp. $11.95. A Few Words in the Mother Tongue: Poems Selected and New (1971-1990), by Irena Klepfisz. Portland, OR: Eighth Mountain Press, 1990. 256 pp. $11.95. [Form] and content are determined by our spiritual and material circumstances . By retaining the difficult process by which we reach conclusions (through digressions, free association, interruptions, new beginnings, reiteration) we endow ideas with a three-dimensional reality which makes them accessible and operative in the world" (from preface to Dreams ofan Insomniac, p. xiii). IfI were to take Irena Klepfisz's words at face value, this review would be filled with inkblots and erasures, the beginning of sentences that never fully materialized, and paragraphs that never developed. These failed words and phrases would serve as traces to demarcate the difficulties I have had in reviewing these three texts. These difficulties do not emerge from a distaste for the texts, for the authors or their writing styles, but rather from the limited space I have in which to trace the multiplicity of ideas that thread their way through these texts. These difficulties emerge from trying to explain how these two authors' writings are so alike, when on the surface they appear so unlike. Alice Kaplan's memoir and Irena Klepfisz's collections of poetry and essays emerge from very different contexts, narrate very different histories, and tell very different stories, and yet each of these texts made me rethink my own relationship to language and to history. 146 SHOFAR Fall 1995 Vol. 14, No.1 Alice Kaplan's French Lessons could most aptly be described as a memoir of language. Kaplan constructs her memoir as a series of essays built around language, specifically her relationship to French. She divides the essays into four sections: "Before I Knew French," "Getting It," "Getting It Right," and "Revisions." Each essay (and each section) builds on the preceding ones, yet each essay (and each section) is also selfcontained and can be read separately from the others. Each is a "lesson" and a remembering complete in itself, though each can be paired and compared with other essays. In the essay entitled "Boarding School in Switzerland," for example Kaplan details her struggle to master the sounds of French, as much as the meanings. She focuses particularly on the French "r," one of the sounds most difficult for Americans to master. She returns to this struggle in her essay entitled "In Search of the French 'R'." In the earlier essay, Kaplan narrates from the perspective of a young student, struggling to discover who she is in relation to a foreign culture and language, as well as in relation to her home and her family. In the later essay, Kaplan, as teacher of that "r," evaluates what she has learned in order to understand what she herself now teaches. Other essays similarly wind in and out of entangled memories: "leaving," "Coming Home," and "Returning Home" is one example, and "The last Summer at Wildhurst Road," "Guy, de Man, and Me," and "The Interview" is another. In French Lessons, Kaplan details her relationship to language beginning with the first "adult" words that her older brother and sister challenge her to repeat when she is a three-year-old to the professor of French that she becomes. She describes her childhood, her coming of age, and the challenges of her chosen profession through the prism of language. language becomes the means for her to channel her energies and her anxieties as an adolescent, to locate herself in the world as an adult, to identify potential dangers and safe havens. language becomes a way for her to orient herself as a woman and as a Jew. This memoir is about learning how to survive within multiple identities-academic, woman, Jew-recognizing her privilege and the losses of her life, trying to determine the history and...

French Lessons: A Memoir

Brilliantly uniting the personal and the critical, Lessons is a powerful autobiographical experiment. It tells the story of an American woman escaping into the French language and of a scholar and teacher coming to grips with her history of learning. Kaplan begins with a distinctly American quest for an imaginary France of the intelligence. But soon her infatuation with all things French comes up against the dark, unimagined recesses of French political and cultural life.The daughter of a Jewish lawyer who prosecuted Nazi war criminals at Nuremburg, Kaplan grew up in the 1960s in the Midwest. After her father's death when she was seven, French became her way of leaving home and finding herself in another language and culture. In spare, midwestern prose, by turns intimate and wry, Kaplan describes how, as a student in a Swiss boarding school and later in a junior year abroad in Bordeaux, she passionately sought the French r, attentively honed her accent, and learned the idioms of her French lover.When, as a graduate student, her passion for French culture turned to the elegance and sophistication of its intellectual life, she found herself drawn to the language and style of the novelist Louis-Ferdinand Celine. At the same time she was repulsed by his anti-Semitism. At Yale in the late 70s, during the heyday of deconstruction she chose to transgress its apolitical purity and work on a subject made history impossible to ignore: French fascist intellectuals. Kaplan's discussion of the de Man affair -- the discovery that her brilliant and charismatic Yale professor had written compromising articles for the pro-Nazi Belgian press--and her personal account of theparadoxes of deconstruction are among the most compelling available on this subject. Lessons belongs in the company of Sartre's Words and the memoirs of Nathalie Sarraute, Annie Ernaux, and Eva Hoffman. No book so engrossingly conveys both the excitement of learning and the moral dilemmas of the intellectual life.

French Lessons: A Memoir (review)

French Lessons: A Memoir (review)

Air medical transport: “Hot Air” and a French lesson

Air medical transport: “Hot Air” and a French lesson

The Reduction of Disruptive Behaviour Using Feedback On-Task Behaviour: An Across Setting Study of a Class of 12- and 13-Year-Old Pupils

The growing body of research indicating that classroom behavioural management strategies can successfully modify the behaviour of mainstream classes of disruptive adolescent pupils is referred to. These “successes” are qualified by the observation that they could make the pupil teacher dependent, whereas pupil self-control is the ideal control state. Feedback strategies have the potential to encourage internalization of control (Van Houton, 1984). An intervention package involving the feedback of level of on-task behaviour as a major component is described. The effect on the individual and the group's level of on-task behaviour in two settings (Religious Education and French lessons) is reported. Claims are made that (1) the intervention promoted levels of on-task behaviour and (2) the group data generally reflected the data of individual pupils. The conclusions are drawn that while it remains to be demonstrated that the behavioural attributional tendencies of the pupils were moved in the direction of “internalization” nonetheless the research can serve as a starting point for further research in this area.

Instructional Computing in French: The Student View

Clearly articulated student perceptions of computer assisted language learning (CALL) programs are needed to develop effective student‐centered CALL materials. A project involving the use of CALL French lessons by university‐level students was undertaken to explore student reactions to various lesson design features. Summaries of student responses to a post‐project questionnaire show that mastery‐level learning expectations could be implemented as a feasible goal in drill‐and‐practice software when supported by adequate learner assistance and that computer quizzes had a useful function. In general, students' perceptions of the instructional value of CALL materials were not directly related to achievement.

The Franco-File: Several Thousand Items for the Enrichment of French Lessons

The Franco-File: Several Thousand Items for the Enrichment of French Lessons

Spanish take French lessons

Spanish take French lessons

The Morris Tune

Research Article| July 01 1986 The Morris Tune John M. Ward John M. Ward Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Journal of the American Musicological Society (1986) 39 (2): 294–331. https://doi.org/10.2307/831532 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation John M. Ward; The Morris Tune. Journal of the American Musicological Society 1 July 1986; 39 (2): 294–331. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/831532 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentJournal of the American Musicological Society Search This content is only available via PDF. Copyright 1986 The American Musicological Society, Inc. Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Bills of Rights and Trade Union Immunities: Some French Lessons

Journal Article Bills of Rights and Trade Union Immunities: Some French Lessons Get access M. Forde M. Forde *Lecturer in Law, University CollegeCork Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Industrial Law Journal, Volume 13, Issue 1, 1984, Pages 40–49, https://doi.org/10.1093/ilj/13.1.40 Published: 01 June 1984

A French lesson in judicial review

A French lesson in judicial review

The Lecture — — but They Can't Read It!

ABSTRACT In studying a French lesson, there is a tendency for students to lose the positive effects gained during the listening and speaking phase when they meet with frustration in trying to read the Lecture. In this study, the authors used two readability formulas to examine the Lecture in six books used to teach Beginning French at the college or university level. Results indicated that the Lecture is generally difficult for the student to read and that it is generally not systematically graduated in difficulty through the books.

French Lesson at the Comedie

The Comédie Français recently opened a most remarkable and instructive production of Tartuffe. This production, directed by Jean Paul Roussillon, is remarkable because it audaciously presents the play as a tragedy. It is instructive that such a radical re-interpretation of a comic classic could occur within the hallowed halls of the Palais Royale, this most conservative company’s home for three centuries.

French Lessons on Handicap

French Lessons on Handicap

The French Lesson: The Right to Culture

<u>The French Lesson</u>: The Right to Culture

French Lessons on Economic Growth

French Lessons on Economic Growth

What Can Beginners Read?*

O Y BOSS wants to know .. . is about the only remark ,,M that I remember from a recent talkie. My superindent also wants to know why we study French in high school. Competent men in the field of modern languages have decided that the skill most worth acquiring is that of being able to sit down and read from a book of comparatively easy French, gleaning its ideas and thought. Two years is a very short time in which to accomplish such an aim, but it can be done if we start reading at once. Now reading, as these committees have defined it, does not admit of any use of the Hunt system, such as is generally used by beginning typists who wish to become one-finger experts. In the Hunt method, the breeze in the study hall is gentle, but continuous, as pupils turn the leaves to get to the vocabulary for the meaning of every third word. The words thus found are hastily written in above the French ones, and the pupil has his French lesson for the day. How much would adults read if they had to look up every fourth or fifth word in the dictionary? Not even the funny strip! Of course, there would be a few puzzle-solvers and unusual people who would like the task, but most of us would not relish such an activity. We would say that this procedure could not and should not be called reading, that reading is a thinking process, and that the mechanics of reading must not be conscious. We read to appreciate the ideas and feelings expressed, and not to juggle words.