Jean Balsamo Books

"Les études consacrées à Montaigne ont connu au XIXe siècle une "ère Payen" et au XXe siècle une "ère Villey". Depuis le début des années 1990, elles connaissent une "ère Desan", tant les travaux, les activités collectives et les initiatives éditoriales de Philippe Desan, à l'Université de Chicago et autour des Montaigne Studies, ont contribué à leur développement transdisciplinaire et à leur diffusion internationale. Les quarante-neuf contributions réunies dans ce volume, dues à des chercheurs de tous les continents, lui rendent hommage et contribuent, en suivant sa leçon, à la connaissance d'un Montaigne global."--Page 4 of cover.

In 1572 Montaigne retired to his estates in order to devote himself to leisure, reading and reflection. There he wrote his constantly expanding 'essays', inspired by the ideas he found in books from his library and his own experience. He discusses subjects as diverse as war-horses and cannibals, poetry and politics, sex and religion, love and friendship, ecstasy and experience. Above all, Montaigne studied himself to find his own inner nature and that of humanity. The Essays are among the most idiosyncratic and personal works in all literature. An insight into a wise Renaissance mind, they continue to engage, enlighten and entertain modern readers.

Carmen, a Spanish story? Not in the spirit of Mérimée, who ironically sidesteps the Castilian Hispanicism of the romantics and reveals the fringes of the peninsula: in Andalusia, between Seville and Gibraltar, the mad love of a rootless Basque for a Bohemian girl, without homeland or ties. A passion for extremes: José, a brigand, and Carmen, an actress with multiple faces. A passion for freedom, which conceals a deeper longing revealed in this critical edition. The strange fascination the narrator, an overlooked character in Bizet's opera, feels for Carmen: a French scholar captivated by the enchantments of this woman who speaks a fiery and brutal language he cannot understand. Is Carmen the embodiment of literature, magical and fatal? Perhaps it is this other love story, this corrida of words hidden at the heart of the text, that gives the tale of Carmen's life and death its true universality.