The Pensive Citadel

The Pensive Citadel

A reflective volume of essays on literature and literary study from a storied professor. In The Pensive Citadel , Victor Brombert looks back on a lifetime of learning within a university world greatly altered since he entered Yale on the GI Bill in the 1940s. Yet for all that has changed, much of Brombert’s long experience as a reader and teacher is richly familiar: the rewards of rereading, the joy of learning from students, and most of all the insight to be found in engaging works of literature. The essays gathered here range from meditations on laughter and jealousy to new appreciations of Brombert’s lifelong companions Shakespeare, Montaigne, Voltaire, and Stendhal.  A veteran of D-day and the Battle of the Bulge who witnessed history’s worst nightmares firsthand, Brombert nevertheless approaches literature with a lightness of spirit, making the case for intellectual mobility and openness to change. The Pensive Citadel is a celebration of a life lived in literary study, and of what can be learned from attending to the works that form one’s cultural heritage. “ The Pensive Citadel offers an elegiac account of a life as reader and teacher—and lover of literature who knows how to share that love.” ― Peter Brooks, Yale University “ The Pensive Citadel  is an engaging and persuasive plea for the central importance of literature to a well-rounded existence and a vigorous life of the mind. Brombert deftly weaves his own experiences and his changing responses to works of literature into his readings and rereadings. In this book, he successfully answers a question he often discussed with his students: Do literary works merely provide a higher form of entertainment, or is the printed word the revelation of a dialogue we carry on with ourselves? It is most emphatically both and more.” ― Tess Lewis, writer, essayist, and translator “There is an old-fashioned pleasure in reading these essays and being so intimately in the company of its witty, reflective, and deeply read author. I suggest beginning at the end with ‘The Permanent Sabbatical’ and then moving on to ‘In Praise of Jealousy?’ round the middle and then on to the rest. One cannot go wrong.” ― Thomas W. Laqueur, University of California, Berkeley "Retired Princeton University comparative literature professor Brombert reflects on his life in academia in this ruminative essay collection. . . . Brombert’s enthusiastic takes on the French classics show what made him a beloved professor, but the reverent accounts of university life and detailed discussions of navigating trends in literary criticism will hold the most appeal for fellow academics. Literature scholars will want to check this out." ― Publishers Weekly "Brombert’s book mingles memoir and what might be called literary contemplation rather than conventional academic criticism. His text is an acknowledgment of intellectual and literary debts, and he celebrates our much-abused and neglected inheritance." ― The New Criterion “The Berlin-born centenarian scholar Victor Brombert has published a swan-song anthology of essays on his teaching career and literary enthusiasms, among them Montaigne, Molière and Malraux. . . his book brings to life a bygone age with self-effacing humor and irreverence.” ― Times Literary Supplement Victor Brombert is the Henry Putnam University Professor Emeritus of Romance and Comparative Literatures at Princeton University and the author of many books. Christy Wampole is assistant professor of French at Princeton University. The early morning hours were the most difficult. Lying in bed in the rented room next to the funeral parlor, I listened to the engines of the limousines lining up in the adjacent driveway, ready to convey their coffined loads to the town’s periphery.  Thoughts drifted. It was difficult enough to get started on drizzly days, but even more so when the early rays of the sun intruded with insistent irony. Half awake, I was afraid to fall asleep again and not make it in time all the way to Phelps Hall, where I was to meet my class. I had already been late several times, and as a teaching graduate student I was vulnerable to occasional unannounced inspections. Yet I looked forward to facing my students. I had overheard senior professors talk enviously of sabbaticals. For me, those were at that point only distant mirages. In the present, it was fun to make my freshmen repeat “C’est rond, c’est long, c’est bon”—the slightly salacious words uttered with inescapable innuendo by the fictional Mireille in the Méthode Orale, our textbook in  this intensive language course.  That was more than six decades ago. Presently, the emeritus professor seated on a bench with a missing slat in Parc Monceau, at the edge of the 8th Arrondissement, muses on the actual sabbaticals that punctuated his academic life. A film in rewind. The self takes on the features of a character in a third-person narration. He and I absorb impressions of the park: the fak