Editorial Reviews of memory and politics on amazon
Book Description
On the one hand, Louis Aragon (1897–1982) was iconoclastic: a founding member of the Surrealist movement, the son of a man who was masqueraded as his godfather for the first nineteen years of his life, and a bisexual who came out following the death of his wife. On the other hand, like so many other writers who as young men witnessed the slaughter of World War I at close quarters, Aragon was profoundly marked by the experience. Within his multifaceted oeuvre, the overarching theme of war is one permanent and unchangeable facet of this work—and while many books have been published on Aragon, none go beyond the figure of the Resistance poet to explore the subject of war throughout his career. Memory and Politics does just that, tracing two strands of Aragon’s critique of war: an ideological strand which voices the policies of the Communist Party, and a personal strand which voices memory and loss.
| Nationality |
France |
| Pub Place |
Paris |
| First Edition |
Yes |
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limited to 2500 copies
Louis Aragon was born in Paris in the fashionable sixteenth arrondissement, where his family ran a pension. After studies at Lycée Carnot, Aragon graduated in 1916. He then entered the University of Paris, where he studied medicine. In World War I Aragon served briefly as an 'auxiliary doctor'. After the war he continued at the university.
In the Spanish Civil War, Aragon fought against the Nationalists, and when the Nazis occupied France in WW II he was a member of Resistance movement. During this period a new nationalistic sentiment entered into Aragon's poetry. He helped to build up through the National Writer's Committee a network of major and minor writers who contributed to the Resistance journals, among them La Drôme en armes and Étoiles. Many of Aragon's poems were set to music and quoted in letters. Le crève-coeur (1941) was the first of five other collections that chronicled France under the Nazi occupation.
