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Paul Bénichou, (19 September 1908 – 14 May 2001) was a French writer, intellectual, critic, and literary historian. Bénichou first achieved prominence in 1948 with ''Morales du grand siècle'', his work on the social context of the French seventeenth-century classics. Later Bénichou undertook a prodigious research program, seeking to understand the radical pessimism and disappointment expressed by mid-nineteenth writers. This project resulted in a series of major works, beginning with ''Le Sacre de l’écrivain, 1750-1830'' (1973; Eng. trans. 1999 (Consecration of the Writer, 1750-1830'' )). A 1995 volume, ''Selon Mallarmé'', may be considered an extension of this series. Together, these works amount to an important reinterpretation of French romanticism. Critic Tzvetan Todorov described Bénichou’s special interest as “the thought of poets.” More generally, though, Paul Bénichou’s work contributed to the understanding of the creative writer's place in modernity, and illuminated the role of writers in legitimating the institutions and values of modern society. ==Early years== Bénichou was born in Tlemcen, French Algeria (now Tlemcen, Algeria), to a Sephardi family. His intellectual brilliance soon called him to Paris. He had won the annual ''concours général des lycées'' for best ''thème latin'' in his final year of secondary school at the ''lycée d'Oran''. After the baccalauréat (1924), he came to the Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris to prepare the École Normale Supérieure; he was successful in 1926 and studied there, where Jean-Paul Sartre, Raymond Aron, Paul Nizan and Maurice Merleau-Ponty were among his fellow students. He obtained his ''license'' in 1927 and his ''agrégation'' in 1930, then becoming a secondary teacher. During his student years Bénichou was active in radical politics and literary surrealism, writing poetry; his name is mentioned in Maurice Nadeau’s ''Histoire du surréalisme''. But it was as a scholar and a teacher that Bénichou made his mark. While teaching in French secondary schools he had all but completed his first major work, ''Morales du grand siècle'', when Hitler unleashed his blitzkrieg. After the desaster of 1940 and the installation of the virulently anti-Semitic Vichy regime, Bénichou, as a Jew, was denied the right to earn his livelihood by teaching in French schools, and as an Algerian Jew, found himself stripped of French nationality.〔In 1870 the Algerian natives of Jewish religion had been given the French citizenship, contrary to the Muslim natives. In 1940 Vichy abolished this decision.〕 After living in the French unoccupied zone, Bénichou could leave in 1942 with his family to Argentina, where he had been offered a teaching position in the university of Mendoza; afterwards, he taught in Buenos Aires, at the Institut Français (co-founded by Roger Caillois). While in the Argentine capital he participated in literary circles and met Jorge Luis Borges, whom he and his daughter, Sylvia Roubaud, would later translate; he also developed a scholarly interest in medieval Spanish literature and published groundbreaking work on the Spanish ''romancero''. The publication and critical success of ''Morales du grand siècle'' (1948; Eng. trans. 1971 (and Ethics'' )) established his scholarly reputation; the volume has never gone out of print and has sold more than 100,000 copies. But it had been refused as a doctoral work and Paul Bénichou could therefore not become a University teacher in France. Returned to Paris in 1949, he got a position at the prestigious Lycée Condorcet, where Marcel Proust studied in the 1880s; he continued to teach there until 1958. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Paul Bénichou」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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