Richard Scholar

The fascinating history of French words that have entered the English language and the fertile but fraught relationship between English- and French-speaking cultures across the world English has borrowed more words from French than from any other modern foreign language. French words and phrases—such as à la mode, ennui, naïveté and caprice—lend English a certain je-ne-sais-quoi that would otherwise elude the language. Richard Scholar examines the continuing history of untranslated French words in English and asks what these words reveal about the fertile but fraught relationship that England and France have long shared and that now entangles English- and French-speaking cultures all over the world. Émigrés demonstrates that French borrowings have, over the centuries, “turned” English in more ways than one. From the seventeenth-century polymath John Evelyn’s complaint that English lacks “words that do so fully express” the French ennui and naïveté, to George W. Bush’s purported claim that “the French don’t have a word for entrepreneur,” this unique history of English argues that French words have offered more than the mere seasoning of the occasional mot juste. They have established themselves as “creolizing keywords” that both connect English speakers to—and separate them from—French. Moving from the realms of opera to ice cream, the book shows how migrant French words are never the same again for having ventured abroad, and how they complete English by reminding us that it is fundamentally incomplete. At a moment of resurgent nationalism in the English-speaking world, Émigrés invites native Anglophone readers to consider how much we owe the French language and why so many of us remain ambivalent about the migrants in our midst.

French Words That Turned English

Émigrés

What is the je-ne-sais-quoi? How - if at all - can it be put into words? In addressing these questions, Richard Scholar offers the first full-length study of the je-ne-sais-quoi and its fortunes in early modern Europe. He describes the rise and fall of the expression as a noun and as a topic of debate, examines its cluster of meanings, and uncovers the scattered traces of its 'pre-history'. The je-ne-sais-quoi is often assumed to belong purely to the realmof the literary, but in the early modern period it serves to articulate problems of knowledge in natural philosophy, the passions, and culture, and for that reason it is approached here from an interdisciplinary perspective. Placing major figures of the period such as Montaigne, Shakespeare, Descartes, Corneille, and Pascalalongside some of their lesser-known contemporaries, Scholar argues that the je-ne-sais-quoi serves above all to capture first-person encounters with a 'certain something' that is as difficult to explain as its effects are intense. When early modern writers use the expression in this way, he suggests, they give literary form to an experience that twenty-first-century readers may recognize as something like their own.

Je-ne-sais-quoi Early Mod Euro C

Neil Kenny

Wes Williams

This volume tracks a Montaigne 'in transit' all the way from the genesis and production of his Essais and travel journal in the 1570s-90s to their diffusion and reception from the 1580s up till the present day, in France, England, Germany, and elsewhere. The contributors take those key terms - genesis, production, diffusion, reception - as their starting-point, but show that the boundaries between them are blurred. How does embodied thought move through space and time between the author and reader of the Essais? Can the role of the ancient writers whom Montaigne quotes be assessed without consideration of the differences he knew there would be between readers' capacities to recognise and contextualise those quotations? Where does Montaigne's punctuation end and that of his compositors, editors, and translators begin? This volume asks such questions by exploring transit as a critical concept cutting across different languages, places, and times. Its authors include leading specialists in early modern French and English studies. It is a tribute to Ian Maclean, whose own trailblazing work has moved through and across numerous fields of early modern learned culture.

Essays in Honour of Ian MacLean

Montaigne in Transit

What is the je-ne-sais-quoi? How-if at all-can it be put into words? In addressing these questions, Richard Scholar offers the first full-length study of the je-ne-sais-quoi and its fortunes in early modern Europe. He describes the rise and fall of the expression as a noun and as a topic of debate, examines its cluster of meanings, and uncovers the scattered traces of its 'pre-history'. The je-ne-sais-quoi is often assumed to belong purely to the realm of the literary, but in the early modern period it serves to articulate problems of knowledge in natural philosophy, the passions, and culture, and for that reason it is approached here from an interdisciplinary perspective. Placing major figures of the period such as Montaigne, Shakespeare, Descartes, Corneille, and Pascal alongside some of their lesser-known contemporaries, Scholar argues that the je-ne-sais-quoi serves above all to capture first-person encounters with a 'certain something' that is as difficult to explain as its effects are intense. When early modern writers use the expression in this way, he suggests, they give literary form to an experience that twenty-first-century readers may recognize as something like their own.

Encounters with a Certain Something

The Je-Ne-Sais-Quoi in Early Modern Europe

Eva Sansavior

Caribbean Globalizations explores the relations between globalization and the Caribbean since 1492, when Columbus first arrived in the region, to the present day. It aims to help change prevalent ways of thinking, not only about the Caribbean archipelago as a complex field of historical enquiry and cultural production, but also about the nature of globalization. It argues that the region has long been - and remains - a theatre of conflict between, as well as a site of emergence for, different forms of globalization. It thereby offers the opportunity to focus research and debate across the interdisciplinary spectrum by reflecting upon and re-imagining the idea of globalization in a specifically Caribbean context. It does so at a time when the Caribbean is urgently rethinking its own identity and place in a world where the Western economic model of globalization is more in question than ever. With contributors including Patrick Chamoiseau, Christopher Miller, Mimi Sheller and Charles Forsdick, this book will be required reading for all scholars working in Caribbean Studies.

Caribbean Globalizations, 1492 to the Present Day

"This is a study of French words and phrases which, untranslated, have entered the English lexicon. Historians calculate that English, since 1500, has borrowed more words from French than from any other modern foreign language. While it has naturalized many of these words, some have visibly retained their foreign roots, leading varied lives in the English-speaking world while eluding translation and resisting integration. Carrying traces of their French roots in the challenges of spelling and pronunciation they pose to native users of English, often set in italic type to distinguish them from the English surrounding them, they are, so to speak, émigrés: French foreigners in our midst. It was primarily in the 1660s that a cluster of phrases and terms with French roots - à- la-mode, ennui, naïveté, caprice -came to prominence in English as Restoration England was Frenchified by Charles II and his court. More often than not these foreign words have been enthusiastically adopted by English users, as if they lent the language a certain je-ne- sais-quoi that would otherwise elude English expression and leave it tantalisingly incomplete, though occasionally the adoption of these words has met with fear and hostility, in a reflection of the ambivalent reception that has so often awaited the foreigners who count these words as part of their native language. Richard Scholar asks several interesting questions: What uses do French foreign words serve in English? To what extent have these uses changed the meanings of the words in French language and culture? And what does the study of these words reveal of the broader relations between neighbouring languages, cultures, and societies? In addressing these questions the author explores what meanings and associations these words have brought with them from the French tradition, and he places their emergence in English within the wider context of early modern social and cultural attitudes towards foreign cultures, their mediators, and the fashion for all things French"--

Prologue: Globalization, globality, globe-stone / Patrick Chamoiseau -- Introduction / Eva Sansavior and Richard Scholar -- The archipelago goes global: late Glissant and the early modern isolario / Richard Scholar -- How globalization invented Indians in the Caribbean / Patricia Seed -- Precocious modernity: environmental change in the early Caribbean / Philip D. Morgan -- 'Slaves' in my family: French modes of servitude in the New World / Christopher L. Miller -- Paradoxical encounters: the essay as a space of globalization in Montaigne's 'Des cannibales' and Maryse Conde's "O brave new world' / Eva Sansavior -- Tobacco: the commodification of the Caribbean and the origins of globalization / Guillaume Pigeard de Gurbert -- The amaranth paradigm: Amerindian indigenous glocality in the Caribbean / Judith Misrahi-Barak -- Aluminium: globalizing Caribbean mobilities, Caribbeanizing global mobilities / Mimi Sheller -- Race and modernity in Hispaniola: tropical matters and development perspectives / David Howard -- Local, national, regional, global: Glissant and the postcolonial manifesto / Charles Forsdick -- Tropical apocalypse: globalization and the Caribbean end times / Martin Munro

Alexis Tadié

The uses of fiction in early modern Europe are far more varied than is often assumed by those who consider fiction to be synonymous with the novel. The contributors to this volume demonstrate the significant role that fiction plays in early modern European culture, not only in a variety of its literary genres, but also in its formation of philosophical ideas, political theories, and the law. The volume explores these uses of fiction in a series of interrelated case studies, ranging from the Italian Renaissance to the French Revolution and examining the work of, among others, Montaigne, Corneille, Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, and Diderot. It asks: Where does fiction live, and thrive? Under what conditions, and to what ends? It suggests that fiction is best understood not as a genre or a discipline but, instead, as a frontier: one that demarcates literary genres and disciplines of knowledge and which, crucially, allows for the circulation of ideas between them.

Fiction and the Frontiers of Knowledge in Europe, 1500–1800

We know a great deal of what Michel de Montaigne (1533-92), Shakespeare's near-contemporary and fellow literary mastermind, thinks. We know, because he tells us on page after page of his Essais, which have marked literature and thought since the European Renaissance and remain to this day compelling reading. It might seem surprising, with this wealth of evidence at hand, that Montaigne could prove so elusive in his thinking. Yet elusive he proves, as volatile as he is voluble. What, we are left wondering, does all that thinking amount to? How is it to be understood? And what value might it have for us? Montaigne has too often seen his thinking reduced to the expression of an '-ism'. Richard Scholar investigates the nature - and detail - of Montaigne's evolving attempts to seek out that elusive thing called truth. Examining at close quarters passages from across the Essais, Scholar provides twenty-first-century readers with a companion guide to a text that is rooted in the time and place of its composition and yet continues to speak to the present, to haunt its readers, to ask them the questions that matter.

Richard Scholar

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