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Once upon a Real Time

Wendy Doniger, 23 March 1995

From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers 
by Marina Warner.
Chatto, 458 pp., £20, October 1994, 0 7011 3530 1
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... better book than her historicist claim leads us to expect; like another closet universalist, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Warner establishes principles that apply far beyond her stated subject. Oddly, or not so oddly, it is Freudians, rather than Jungians, who attract her anti-archetypal fire. ‘An archetype is a hollow thing, but a dangerous one, a ...

Slimed It

Francis Gooding: On N.K. Jemisin, 30 November 2023

The World We Make 
by N.K. Jemisin.
Orbit, 384 pp., £9.99, October 2023, 978 0 356 51272 3
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... a story – powerful cults, saturated with negativity – they might not behave themselves. As Claude Lévi-Strauss understood, every version of a myth, however distant or apparently contradictory, belongs to the myth; every retelling is owned by the story, not by the teller. Freud’s Oedipus isn’t just Freud talking about Oedipus, but one more ...

Look at Don Juan

Adam Shatz: Camus in the New World, 19 October 2023

Travels in the Americas: Notes and Impressions of a New World 
by Albert Camus, edited by Alice Kaplan, translated by Ryan Bloom.
Chicago, 152 pp., £16.99, March, 978 0 226 69495 5
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... the orders of J. Edgar Hoover. Released shortly after, he was whisked to the offices of his host, Claude Lévi-Strauss, the French embassy’s cultural attaché. The FBI continued to monitor him throughout his three-month stay.‘I hate travelling and explorers’ was the famous opening line of Lévi-Strauss’s memoir ...

We do it all the time

Michael Wood: Empson’s Intentions, 4 February 2016

... century. Russian formalism haunted French structuralism, and not only because Roman Jakobson and Claude Lévi-Strauss worked together; Walter Benjamin’s thinking was often, perhaps always, inseparable from the turns his language took. Even the austere Adorno said that one could ‘hardly speak of aesthetic matters unaesthetically, devoid of ...

Fritz Lang and the Life of Crime

Michael Wood, 20 April 2017

... be resolved is one I’ve treasured and admired for a long time. It belongs to the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. He sketches it out in an essay called ‘The Structural Study of Myth’, and it underlies his magnificent four-volume series Mythologiques. ‘The purpose of myth,’ Lévi-Strauss says, ‘is to ...

The Land East of the Asterisk

Wendy Doniger: The Indo-Europeans, 10 April 2008

Indo-European Poetry and Myth 
by M.L. West.
Oxford, 525 pp., £80, May 2007, 978 0 19 928075 9
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... distinctively Indo-European’ – but only because it is, again, found in Mesopotamia. Claude Lévi-Strauss has answers for one, though not all, of these quandaries. In one stroke (in his essay ‘Split Representation in the Art of Asia and America’, in Structural Anthropology), he stopped the fight between historical diffusion and ...

Inquisition Mode

Tariq Ali: Victor Serge’s Defective Bolshevism, 16 July 2020

Notebooks: 1936-47 
by Victor Serge, translated by Mitchell Abidor and Richard Greeman.
NYRB, 651 pp., £17.99, April 2019, 978 1 68137 270 9
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... North African coast and headed in the direction of Martinique. André Breton was on board; so was Claude Lévi-Strauss. Both were wonderful raconteurs. There are caustic pen portraits of French and Soviet writers and politicians, and descriptions of other passengers. The forward section is ‘densely populated but maintains a chic tone because of a group ...

The Most Beautiful Icicle

Inigo Thomas: Apollo 11, 15 August 2019

Reaching for the Moon: A Short History of the Space Race 
by Roger D. Launius.
Yale, 256 pp., £20, July 2019, 978 0 300 23046 8
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The Moon: A History for the Future 
by Oliver Morton.
Economist Books, 334 pp., £20, May 2019, 978 1 78816 254 8
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... Times asked various people to reflect on what the moonshots had meant to them. One of them was Claude Lévi-Strauss. ‘I never look at TV except when there’s a moonshot,’ he said, and then I am glued to my set, even though it’s boring, always the same and lasts a long time. Still, I can’t turn away. In this sad century, in this sad world ...

Diary

Elif Batuman: Pamuk’s Museum, 7 June 2012

... have its own special shameful melancholy, imperceptible to everyone except Istanbullus and maybe Claude Lévi-Strauss, sounds to me like an invitation for a bunch of self-important lugubrious dudes to sit around doing nothing and feeling like they’re fulfilling their Hegelian role (if only Hegel applied to the East).In response to the question about ...

Still Superior

Mark Greif: Sex and Susan Sontag, 12 February 2009

Reborn: Early Diaries, 1947-64 
by Susan Sontag, edited by David Rieff.
Hamish Hamilton, 318 pp., £16.99, January 2009, 978 0 241 14431 2
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... thinker. The closest she came to writing about a grand system-builder was a short early review of Claude Lévi-Strauss, and this was a mistake she might not have made had she known him then as the architect of French Structuralism rather than the eccentric bellettrist of Tristes Tropiques. There is no Kant, no Nietzsche, no Marx in Sontag ...

Intolerance

Edmund Leach, 3 May 1984

The Human Cycle 
by Colin Turnbull.
Cape, 283 pp., £9.95, February 1984, 0 224 02173 7
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... which was remaindered after only a few months. It was the first English translation of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques (1955), which had been a best-seller in France and was already recognised as a highly original masterpiece by many professional Anglophone anthropologists. One reason for the failure of A World on the Wane was that ...

Outcasts and Desperados

Adam Shatz: Richard Wright’s Double Vision, 7 October 2021

The Man Who Lived Underground 
by Richard Wright.
Library of America, 250 pp., £19.99, April 2021, 978 1 59853 676 8
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... even more subversive than his former allies.In​ 1946, Wright accepted a formal invitation from Claude Lévi-Strauss to visit France. When he and Ellen arrived in Paris with their young daughter, a reporter asked him whether the ‘black problem’ was close to being resolved in America. ‘There is not a black problem in the United States, but a white ...

Dynasty

Sherry Turkle: Lacan and Co, 6 December 1990

Jacques Lacan and Co: A History of Psychoanalysis in France, 1925-1985 
by Elisabeth Roudinesco, translated by Jeffrey Mehlman.
Free Association, 816 pp., £25, December 1990, 9781853431630
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... psychoanalytic colleagues but in wider intellectual circles. Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Philippe Sollers, Paul Ricoeur and Louis Althusser are all part of Lacan and Co. Like the analysts, each of them had to take a stand for or against Lacan. Lacan would have it no other way. He charged intellectual history with the ...

As If

Jonathan Romney: ‘Cahiers du cinéma’, 9 September 2010

A Short History of ‘Cahiers du cinéma’ 
by Emilie Bickerton.
Verso, 156 pp., £12.99, March 2010, 978 1 84467 232 5
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... came to be known as the Nouvelle Vague: François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette, Claude Chabrol and Maurice Schérer, later known by his pseudonym, Eric Rohmer. By and large, unlike their counterparts on the left-wing journal Positif, the early Cahiers writers were either effectively on the right, like Rohmer, or essentially apolitical in ...

Stewed, roasted, baked or boiled

Claude Rawson, 6 August 1992

The Intelligencer 
by Jonathan Swift and Thomas Sheridan, edited by James Woolley.
Oxford, 363 pp., £50, March 1992, 0 19 812670 0
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Jonathan Swift: A Literary Life 
by Joseph McMinn.
Macmillan, 172 pp., £35, May 1991, 9780333485842
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... Montaigne’s thinking about Amerindians (as it later became part of the ethnographic formation of Lévi-Strauss). Montaigne’s relation to Léry may have been similar to that of Swift to Moryson (Sheridan, who mediated Moryson to Swift, may have translated Montaigne). Even as Montaigne compares Indians eating dead enemies to Frenchmen roasting alive their ...

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