Paul Bénichou

Paul Bénichou ( born September 19, 1908 in Tlemcen, † 14 May 2001, Paris) was a French linguist and literary theorist.

Life and work

Bénichou came from a family of Algerian Sephardim. As a student at the lycée d' Oran, he won the Concours général for the translation into Latin; after the Baccalauréat (1924 ) he went to Paris, Lycée Louis -le- Grand visited in the preparatory class for Ecole Normale Supérieure, where he studied from 1926 to 1930; In 1930, he was the Agrégation and then there was a high school teacher.

During the Second World War, he fled from the German extermination of Jews ( after discharge and precarious existence with family in Lyon) in 1942 to Argentina and taught in Buenos Aires at the Institut français (whose director Roger Caillois was ). He became friends with Jorge Luis Borges. In 1949 he returned to Paris and taught until 1958 at the Lycée Condorcet. Since the manuscript of his most famous book ( Morales du grand siècle ) was 1946 not accepted by the Sorbonne as Thèse, the French university remained closed to him. Instead, he taught with overwhelming success from 1958 to 1979 per year for one semester at Harvard University.

Paul Bénichou was married to Gina Labin- Bénichou, father of Sylvia Roubaud - Bénichou ( b. 1935 ), father of Jacques Roubaud and grandfather of Laurence Roubaud.

Works

• (Ed.) Romancero judeo - español de Marruecos, Buenos Aires 1946, Madrid 1968
• Morales du grand siècle, Paris 1948, 1967, 1988, 1997 ( English: Man and Ethics Studies in French Classicism, Garden City, NY 1971, in Italian. Morali del Grand Siècle, Bologna, 1990; Spanish: Imágenes del hombre en el clasicismo francés, Mexico 1984)
• L' Écrivain et ses travaux, Paris 1967, 1993
• Creación poética en el romancero tradicional, Madrid 1968
• Nerval et la chanson folklorique, Paris 1970
• Le Sacre de l' écrivain, 1750-1830. Essai sur l' avènement d'un pouvoir spiritual laïque dans la France modern, Paris 1973, 4th Edition 1996 ( Spanish: La coronación del escritor, México, 1981; Italian: La consacrazione dello scritore, Bologna 1993, English: The Consecration of the Writer, Lincoln, Neb. / London 1999)
• Le temps des prophètes, Paris 1977 ( Italian: Il tempo dei profeti, Bologna 1997)
• Les mages romantiques, Paris 1988
• L' école du désenchantement. Sainte -Beuve, Nodier, Musset, Nerval, Gautier, Paris 1992
• Selon Mallarme, Paris 1995
• Variétés critiques. De Corneille à Borges, Paris 1996
• Romantismes français, 2 vols, Paris 2004 ( Neuflage the books of 1973, 1977, 1988 and 1992)