Citation

Doering J. J. Hist. Ideas 2022; 83(4): 555-578.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2022, University of Pennsylvania Press)

DOI

10.1353/jhi.2022.0037

PMID

36189656

Abstract

The literary critic and NRF editor Jean Paulhan devised a way of thinking about fluctuating historical and psychological attitudes toward language, organizing them into a dialectic of "Rhetoric" and "Terror." In this article, I focus on Paulhan and Sartre's response to the interwar crisis of Terror and explore Rhetoric and Terror as a heuristic in the intellectual history of France.

The term "linguistic turn" typically suggests a sustain4ed effort to reorieng a given discipline arpound problems of language. Between 1890 and 1950, an array of such turns, forming a "constellation across Europe," strove to investigate "language as such." The literary scene of interwar France, however, was less of a turn and more of an ever spinning tourniquet often propelled by factions pulling away from language Rhetoric and Terror...

Language: en

Keywords

France; *Linguistics