Julien Gracq
Julien Gracq ( born July 27, 1910 as Louis Poirier in Saint -Florent- le- Vieil at Angers, † December 22, 2007 in Angers ) was a French writer. Gracq was one of the most inconspicuous authors of the French literary landscape in terms of the requirement that an author should withdraw behind his work. He was influenced by German Romanticism and Surrealism, and in his work merge free creative imagination and symbolism together.
Life
Between 1921 and 1928, was Gracq boarding school in Nantes, then he went for a year at the Lycée Henri IV in Paris known. 1930 Gracq was admitted to the Paris elite high school École Normale Supérieure, where he studied geography at the same time he attended the École Libre des Sciences Politiques ( forerunner of the Institut d' études politiques de Paris ), which he successfully completed in 1933. Following his Agrégation for history and geography, he began his career as a high school teacher in 1935, first in Nantes, then in Quimper. In 1939 he was drafted as an officer and in 1940 was a POW in Burghammer in Hoyerswerda and there wrote a diary next to a novel and a short story. After the Second World War, he continued his teaching career in Amiens and Angers, until 1947, a point at the Lycée Claude -Bernard was in Paris, where he taught until his retirement in 1970 under his real name Louis Poirier.
In his youth Gracq read with enthusiasm Jules Verne, Edgar Allan Poe and Stendhal. During his Paris school and study time, he came up with the Arthurian legend in touch, probably via a performance of Wagner's Parsifal, and even traveled in the footsteps of the Round Table and the Holy Grail to Cornwall. During this time, awakened his interest for Brittany. Another decisive experience was the reading of Breton's Nadja. All these influences have left their mark in Gracqs work.
Following a rejection by the renowned French publishing house Gallimard published his first work in 1938 Gracq Au château d' Argol the publisher José Corti, which he remained faithful decades. The discovery of the novel by André Breton, the " Pope of Surrealism ", led to a first take notice of literary criticism. Although he was never attributed to fixed Surrealist movement, he remained their spirit as well as the person André Breton's always connected.
Gracq last lived retired in his birthplace of Saint- Florent- le- Vieil on the Loire; in December 2007, at the age of 97 years, he died a few days after a bout of weakness in a hospital in Angers.
Work
The reading of Ernst Jünger's emblematic novel On the Marble Cliffs in 1943 seemed to Gracq like a revelation: many stylistic and thematic parallels in Gracqs subsequent works bear witness of the disciple influence. Both authors are later encountered repeatedly in person.
Gracqs first - and only - play, Le Roi pêcheur, was premiered in 1949 and panned by the critics. This experience contributed to the fact that he has since the French literary world faced skeptical. Following the publication of a hard-hitting pamphlet on the state of literature and the literary prizes, which appeared in the journal EMPEDOCLE 1950 Gracq rejected a year later, consequently, the prestigious Prix Goncourt for his novel Le Rivage of Syrtes off, sparking a storm of indignation in the media. Since the 1960s, the fictional work is in Gracq receded into the background in favor of numerous essays and literary criticism ( Préférences, Lettrines I Lettrines II and En lisant, en écrivant ), in which both his extensive education as well as his critique of underlying mental acuity shine through. The publication of his complete works in the famous Bibliothèque de la Pléiade in his lifetime became the father of the great esteem in which experiences Gracq in France.
Works
- Au château d' Argol (1938 ) Roman - German: At Castle Argol
- Un beau Ténébreux (1945 ) novel. The tempter, Roman; translated and with an afterword by Dieter Hornig. Literaturverlag Droschl, Graz 2014, ISBN 978-3-85420-952-2.
- Oeuvres Completes I ( Bibliothèque de la Pléiade 354) Paris: Gallimard, 1989 ISBN 2-07-011162-8
- Oeuvres complètes II ( ibid., 421) Paris: Gallimard, 1995 ISBN 2-07-011287- X