Andre Gide's Politics : Rebellion and Ambivalence

by Tom Conner

• ISBN13: 9780312227081
• ISBN10: 0312227086
• Format: Trade Book
• Copyright: 2001-02-24
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

At the peak of his career, after having established himself as an accomplished writer, astute moraliste, and the foremost spokesperson of his generation for personal freedom and self-realization, Gide became aware, first, that his particular brand of bourgeois individualism was becoming increasingly irrelevant in the contemporary world and, second, that social commitment and even revolution could serve as a powerful source of inspiration and self-renewal. Over a ten-year period that began in the 1920s and ended with his public break with the Soviet Union in 1936, Gide the committed intellectual interacted with society in ways that were for him unprecedented. These essays examine the outcomes of Gide's evolving commitment to a host of controversial issues ranging from the sexual to the political, from the literary to the social.

Author Biography

Tom Conner is Associate Professor of French at St. Norbert College in De Pere, Wisconsin.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	v
Prefatory Note	vii
Introduction	1	(12)
Tom Conner
The Meaning and Impact of Andre Gide's Engagement	13	(10)
Daniel Moutote
The Unrepentant Prodigal: Gide's Classical Politics and Republican Nationalism, 1897-1909	23	(24)
M. Martin Guiney
Practices of Posterity: Gide and the Cultural Politics of Sexuality	47	(26)
Michael Lucey
Gide and Justice: The Immoralist in the Palace of Reason	73	(16)
John Lambeth
Writing the Wrongs of French Colonial Africa: Voyage au Congo and Le Retour du Tchad	89	(22)
Walter Putnam
Sightseeing: Voyage au Congo and the Ethnographic Spectacle	111	(20)
Jeffrey Geiger
Left-Wing Intellectuals in the entre-deux-guerres	131	(8)
Jean-Francois Sirinelli
Having Congress: The Shame of the Thirties	139	(22)
Roger Shattuck
Gide and Soviet Communism	161	(18)
Paul Hollander
Unfinished Business: Andre Gide's Genevieve and the Constraints of Socialist Realism	179	(26)
Peter F. DeDomenico
Gide and the Feminist Voice	205	(24)
Naomi Segal
Gide under Siege: Domestic Conflict and Political Allegory in the World War II Journal	229	(34)
Jocelyn Van Tuyl
Theseus Revisited: Commitment throught Myth	263	(21)
Pamela A. Genova
Notes on the Contributors	284	(3)
Index	287