Pascal's Lettres Provinciales: The Motif and Practice of Fragmentation - Hardcover

Louis A. MacKenzie

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0917786637 ISBN 13: 9780917786631

Publisher: Summa Pubns, 1988

Synopsis

In this study which highlight the textual richness rather than the theological propriety of 'Les Lettres provinciales,' Professor MacKenzie focuses on the recurring issue of fragmentation. In the view Pascal wants to promulgate, fragmentation would characterize Jesuitical casuistry in a basic way, informing as it does the semilogy, textual stratagems and moral theology of his Molinist rivals. In debunking such modes of thinking, Pascal himself turns to tactics of counter-fragmentation which allow him to put his own structure of Truth, defined as simple and unfragmented, into the most intense relief.

About this title

About the Author:

Louis MacKenzie, Jr. is Chair, Department of Music, Associate Professor of French at Notre Dame University, Indiana. He received his B.A. from University of Notre Dame; M.A., Middlebury College, and Ph.D., from Cornell University. MacKenzie's teaching and Research interests include, but are not limited to, 17th-century French literature, with special focus on Jansenism (Pascal, La Rochefoucauld, La Bruyere and Racine). He also works on French poetry generally with special emphasis on those poets (e.g., Ronsard, du Bellay, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Valery et. al) who treat the subject of the poet in their poetry. MacKenzie also teaches a cultural studies course on opera and French literature and another on Louis XIV's Versailles. He is a three time winner of university teaching awards, the Kaneb, the Joyce and, in 2011, the Madden as the outstanding teacher of first-year students.

Review:

...Disons d'emblee que le travail de Louis A. MacKenzie est de haute qualite. Il atteste a  la fois la comprehension minutieuse d'un texte difficile et la capacite a  en maitriser la matiere sous le pregnant motif de la fragmentation. La dissemination lui sert paradoxalement de force synthÃehisante, et a  juste titre. Les deux premiers chapitres en particulier apportent, avec la thematique du quantifiable et celle de la manipulation linguistique, une perspective particulierement feconde dont nul pascalien ne pourra desormais faire l'economie...(Ses qualites de fond) sont d'offrir partout, dans une langue vive et brillante, de fines analyses textuelles et, particulierement dans ses deux premiers chapitres, une approche des 'Provinciales' a la fois originale et irrecusable. --Cahiers du dix-septieme

...(in this study) there are many rewarding explications and insights, among which the semiotic analysis of the expression 'grace suffisante', the remarks on the notions of time and place in Pascal's reading of casuists, and the discussion of charity, truth, and violence. This book will challenge specialists, but the pedagogical ease with which complex issues of style and morality are handled assures it wider readership.... --(Van Kelly) The French Review

...With great lucidity and better than most of Pascal's interpreters before him, (Mackenzie) demonstrates the kinship between 'Les Provinciales' and 'Les Pensees', both of which inspired by a logic of quality and grace, by a search for the legitimacy of two discourses, coexisting and reunited into the consciousness of the faithful, the language of God and the language of mankind, and by the preliminary ceritude that the logic of quality should never be reductible to the logic of statistics. ...MacKenzie's study, in its brevity and density, is an important contribution to Pascalian research, a stimulating and innovated introduction not only to the 'Lettres pronviciales' but also to the 'Pensees' --South Atlantic Review

About this edition

• Publisher: Summa Pubns
• Publication date: 1988
• ISBN 10: 0917786637
• ISBN 13: 9780917786631
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 135