Volume 30, Number 3 · March 3, 1983
Greece à la Française
By Bernard Knox
Le Chasseur noir: Formes de pensée et formes de société dans le monde grec
by Pierre Vidal-Naquet
Maspero (Paris), 487 pp., 140 francs
Ever since the turn of the century Paris has been the arbiter of fashion for the English-speaking world and though since the Second World War the dictates of its couturiers on skirt lengths have not imposed the universal conformity they once did, the methodologies launched by its intellectuals have all, in their turn, found industrious promoters and an enthusiastic clientele. Fashion however is a quick-change artist and some of her intellectual creations no one would now want to be seen dead in. Even the most infatuated of sentimental leftists had long ago to give up trying to explain Sartre's manic switches as he wriggled on the hook attached to the Party line, and almost everyone now realizes that Roland Barthes was too great a wit to have taken his own late work seriously (if SZ is not a gargantuan parody of structuralist criticism there is no excuse for it).
Review, 5430 words
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