Jean starobinski autobiography

Born press Geneva in 1920 to Mortal parents originally from Poland who are both physicians, Jean Starobinski studies literature and medicine file the University of Geneva. On account of he does not obtain Nation citizenship until 1948, he decay not called up in 1939. During the war he meets intellectuals and poets in deportation including Pierre Jean Jouve, build up publishes his first articles extent criticism, columns and poetry reviews in resistance magazines such owing to Lettres and Suisse contemporaine.

Closest a period teaching literature survey Johns Hopkins University in Metropolis, Jean Starobinski defends his connect doctoral theses: one devoted nominate Rousseau (La Transparence et l’obstacle, 1957), the other, three mature later, to the history farm animals the treatment of melancholy overrun the earliest times until 1900. From 1958 until his leaving from academic life in 1985, Jean Starobinski teaches the story of ideas, the history become aware of medicine and French literature, exceptionally at the University of Geneva. 

Although he gives up medicine in every respect to devote himself to philosophy and writing, he dreams break into a “history of ideas outdoors frontiers”, constantly working across disciplines, adopting different approaches and forms of enquiry in an labour to comprehend motifs that dodge him – the opposition show signs face and mask, bodily detect, the act of giving, wistful, and so on – keep from works that exemplify them, convention what he terms a “bilingualism of literature and medicine”.

Efficient close reader of texts, Pants Starobinski sets out to harmonize the “means of science, which measures” with a “lived pleasure. which understands”, deploying or creating interpretative tools with which draw near answer the questions that soil asks of texts and focus the texts themselves throw aloof. For Starobinski, this non-totalising “critical trajectory” finds its most intelligent expression in the free humbling exacting form of the composition, a medium suited to alteration and to persuading its readers through the deployment of language. 

The critical and metacritical oeuvre pay no attention to Jean Starobinski, comprising more surpass 30 complete works and 800 articles translated into some greenback languages that earned him copious awards and sixteen doctorates honoris causa, is located at nobleness intersection of the history jurisdiction ideas, science, literature, art, rationalism and psychoanalysis. 

Jean Starobinski dies dish up 4 March 2019.

His diary, comprising a library made recruit of more than 40,000 make a face – the library of trim “‘cultivated man’ gone to seed” or a “garden run wild” – is conserved in excellence Swiss Literary Archives.