Claude Lévi-Strauss

The Poet in the Laboratory

Claude Lévi-Strauss cover

Description

Claude Lévi-Strauss, the 'father of modern anthropology' and author of the classic Tristes tropiques, was one of the most influential intellectuals of the second half of the twentieth century. Dislodging Sartre, Camus and de Beauvoir from the pinnacle of French intellectual life in the 1950s, he brought about a sea change in Western thought and inspired a generation of thinkers and writers, including Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes and Jacques Lacan with his structuralist theories.


Lévi-Strauss's bohemian childhood and later studies of the emerging discipline of anthropology in the field and the university led him to mix with intellectuals, artists and poets from all over Europe. Tracing the evolution of his ideas through interviews with the man himself, research into his archives and conversations with contemporary anthropologists, Wilcken explores and explains Lévi-Strauss's theories, revealing an artiste manqué who infused his academic writing with an artistic and poetic sensibility.

Product details

Published 21 Nov 2011
Format Paperback
Edition 1st
Extent 384
ISBN 9781408817728
Imprint Bloomsbury Paperbacks
Dimensions 198 x 129 mm
Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing

About the contributors

Author

Patrick Wilcken

Patrick Wilcken grew up in Sydney and studied at G…

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