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Marc Angenot
Encyclopedia
Marc Angenot is a Belgian-Canadian social theorist, historian of ideas and literary critic. He is a professor of French literature at McGill University
, Montreal
, and holder of the James McGill
Chair of Social Discourse Theory there. He is a leading exponent of the sociocritical approach to literature.
(now split into the Université Libre de Bruxelles
and the Vrije Universiteit Brussel
) from 1959 to 1967. His dissertation on the rhetoric
of surrealism
placed him in the line of Chaïm Perelman
, and the Groupe Mu of the University of Liège
.
and Régine Robin
, Angenot made use of the sociological approach to texts. His influences were Pierre Bourdieu
, the Frankfurt School
, and Mikhail Bakhtin
. He favoured the discourse
concept over the structuralist
position on “text”, of Gérard Genette
and Tzvetan Todorov
. His proposal to study the whole array of “social discourse” in a given state of society (1889: Un état du discours social, 1989) was a vast interdisciplinary project concerninig the interdiscursive
construction of society.
and social struggles: Auguste Comte
, Saint-Simon
, Charles Fourier
, Étienne Cabet
, Pierre Leroux
, Proudhon, the Belgian Hippolyte Colins, Jules Guesde
, Georges Sorel
, and others. His conclusions are on the complexities and breaks within this tradition of discourse.
McGill University
Mohammed Fathy is a public research university located in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. The university bears the name of James McGill, a prominent Montreal merchant from Glasgow, Scotland, whose bequest formed the beginning of the university...
, Montreal
Montreal
Montreal is a city in Canada. It is the largest city in the province of Quebec, the second-largest city in Canada and the seventh largest in North America...
, and holder of the James McGill
James McGill
James McGill was a Scottish-Canadian businessman, military commander and philanthropist known for being the founder of McGill University...
Chair of Social Discourse Theory there. He is a leading exponent of the sociocritical approach to literature.
Education
He studied at the Free University of BrusselsFree University of Brussels
The Free University of Brussels was a university in Brussels, Belgium. In 1969, it split into the Université Libre de Bruxelles and the Dutch-speaking Vrije Universiteit Brussel....
(now split into the Université Libre de Bruxelles
Université Libre de Bruxelles
The Université libre de Bruxelles is a French-speaking university in Brussels, Belgium. It has 21,000 students, 29% of whom come from abroad, and an equally cosmopolitan staff.-Name:...
and the Vrije Universiteit Brussel
Vrije Universiteit Brussel
The Vrije Universiteit Brussel is a Flemish university located in Brussels, Belgium. It has two campuses referred to as Etterbeek and Jette.The university's name is sometimes abbreviated by "VUB" or translated to "Free University of Brussels"...
) from 1959 to 1967. His dissertation on the rhetoric
Rhetoric
Rhetoric is the art of discourse, an art that aims to improve the facility of speakers or writers who attempt to inform, persuade, or motivate particular audiences in specific situations. As a subject of formal study and a productive civic practice, rhetoric has played a central role in the Western...
of surrealism
Surrealism
Surrealism is a cultural movement that began in the early 1920s, and is best known for the visual artworks and writings of the group members....
placed him in the line of Chaïm Perelman
Chaim Perelman
Chaïm Perelman was a Polish-born philosopher of law, who studied, taught, and lived most of his life in Brussels. He was among the most important argumentation theorists of the twentieth century...
, and the Groupe Mu of the University of Liège
University of Liège
The University of Liège , in Liège, Wallonia, Belgium, is a major public university in the French Community of Belgium. Its official language is French.-History:...
.
Social discourse and sociocritique
Along with Claude Duchet, Pierre V. Zima, Jacques Leenhardt, André Belleau, Jacques DuboisJacques Dubois
Jacques Dubois , also known as Jacobus Sylvius in Latin, was a French anatomist in Paris.-Early grammar of French:Dubois was the author of the first grammar of the French language to be published in France...
and Régine Robin
Régine Robin
Régine Robin is a historian, novelist, translator and professor of sociology. Her prolific fiction and non-fiction, primarily on the themes of identity and culture and on the sociological practice of literature, have earned a number of awards, including the Governor-General's Award in 1986...
, Angenot made use of the sociological approach to texts. His influences were Pierre Bourdieu
Pierre Bourdieu
Pierre Bourdieu was a French sociologist, anthropologist, and philosopher.Starting from the role of economic capital for social positioning, Bourdieu pioneered investigative frameworks and terminologies such as cultural, social, and symbolic capital, and the concepts of habitus, field or location,...
, the Frankfurt School
Frankfurt School
The Frankfurt School refers to a school of neo-Marxist interdisciplinary social theory, particularly associated with the Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt am Main...
, and Mikhail Bakhtin
Mikhail Bakhtin
Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin was a Russian philosopher, literary critic, semiotician and scholar who worked on literary theory, ethics, and the philosophy of language...
. He favoured the discourse
Discourse
Discourse generally refers to "written or spoken communication". The following are three more specific definitions:...
concept over the structuralist
Structuralism
Structuralism originated in the structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure and the subsequent Prague and Moscow schools of linguistics. Just as structural linguistics was facing serious challenges from the likes of Noam Chomsky and thus fading in importance in linguistics, structuralism...
position on “text”, of Gérard Genette
Gérard Genette
Gérard Genette is a French literary theorist, associated in particular with the structuralist movement and such figures as Roland Barthes and Claude Lévi-Strauss, from whom he adapted the concept of bricolage.-Life:...
and Tzvetan Todorov
Tzvetan Todorov
Tzvetan Todorov is a Franco-Bulgarian philosopher. He has lived in France since 1963 with his wife Nancy Huston and their two children, writing books and essays about literary theory, thought history and culture theory....
. His proposal to study the whole array of “social discourse” in a given state of society (1889: Un état du discours social, 1989) was a vast interdisciplinary project concerninig the interdiscursive
Interdiscourse
Interdiscourse is the implicit or explicit relations that a discourse has to other discourses. Interdiscursivity is the aspect of a discourse that relates it to other discourses. Norman Fairclough prefers the concept "orders of discourse". Interdiscursivity is often mostly an analytic concept, e.g....
construction of society.
Discursive history
In parallel, Angenot developed “discursive history”. Here he examined the grand narratives, but as a modernist, rather than postmodernist. He has been concerned with the nineteenth century, and representative thinkers around revolutionRevolution
A revolution is a fundamental change in power or organizational structures that takes place in a relatively short period of time.Aristotle described two types of political revolution:...
and social struggles: Auguste Comte
Auguste Comte
Isidore Auguste Marie François Xavier Comte , better known as Auguste Comte , was a French philosopher, a founder of the discipline of sociology and of the doctrine of positivism...
, Saint-Simon
Claude Henri de Rouvroy, comte de Saint-Simon
Claude Henri de Rouvroy, comte de Saint-Simon, often referred to as Henri de Saint-Simon was a French early socialist theorist whose thought influenced the foundations of various 19th century philosophies; perhaps most notably Marxism, positivism and the discipline of sociology...
, Charles Fourier
Charles Fourier
François Marie Charles Fourier was a French philosopher. An influential thinker, some of Fourier's social and moral views, held to be radical in his lifetime, have become main currents in modern society...
, Étienne Cabet
Étienne Cabet
Étienne Cabet was a French philosopher and utopian socialist. He was the founder of the Icarian movement and led a group of emigrants to found a new society in the United States.-Biography:...
, Pierre Leroux
Pierre Leroux
Pierre Henri Leroux , French philosopher and political economist, was born at Bercy, now a part of Paris, the son of an artisan.- Life :...
, Proudhon, the Belgian Hippolyte Colins, Jules Guesde
Jules Guesde
Jules Basile Guesde was a French socialist journalist and politician.Guesde was the inspiration for a famous quotation by Karl Marx. Shortly before Marx died in 1883, he wrote a letter to Guesde and Paul Lafargue, both of whom already claimed to represent "Marxist" principles...
, Georges Sorel
Georges Sorel
Georges Eugène Sorel was a French philosopher and theorist of revolutionary syndicalism. His notion of the power of myth in people's lives inspired Marxists and Fascists. It is, together with his defense of violence, the contribution for which he is most often remembered. Oron J...
, and others. His conclusions are on the complexities and breaks within this tradition of discourse.
Rhetoric
Angenot also published a number of books in rhetoric and argumentation, among which La Parole pamphlétaire in 1982, Rhétorique de l'anti-socialisme in 2004, and a treatise of "antilogical" rhetoric, Dialogues de sourds: Traité de rhétorique antilogique in 2008.Publications
- Le Roman populaire. Recherches en paralittérature, Montréal: Presses de l’Université du Québec, 1975.
- Les Champions des Femmes. Examen du discours sur la supériorité des femmes, 1400-1800. Montréal : Presses de l'Université du Québec, 1977.
- La Parole pamphlétaire. Contribution à la typologie des discours modernes. Paris, Payot, 1982, 416 p. (Prix Biguet 1983 de l'Académie françaiseAcadémie françaiseL'Académie française , also called the French Academy, is the pre-eminent French learned body on matters pertaining to the French language. The Académie was officially established in 1635 by Cardinal Richelieu, the chief minister to King Louis XIII. Suppressed in 1793 during the French Revolution,...
). - Critique de la raison sémiotique. Fragment avec pin up. Montréal: Presses de l'Université de Montréal, 1985, 134 p. Translated as: Critique of Semiotic Reason. With an Introduction by Marie-Christine Leps. New York, Toronto & Ottawa: Legas, 1994. (Collection « Language, Media, and Education Studies », # 2).
- Ce que l'on dit des Juifs en 1889. Préface de Madeleine RebériouxMadeleine RebériouxMadeleine Rebérioux was a French historian whose specialty was the French Third Republic. She is also a historian of the Labour movement. From 1991 to 1995 she was President of the Ligue des droits de l'homme and had been a signatory to the Manifesto of the 121. She was an officer of the Légion...
. Paris, Presses de l'Université de Vincennes, 1989. (Collection « Culture et Société »). - Le Cru et le faisandé: sexe, discours social et littérature à la Belle Époque. Bruxelles: Labor, 1986, 202 p. (Collection « Archives du futur »).
- Mille huit cent quatre-vingt-neuf: un état du discours social. Montréal: Éditions du Préambule, 1989, 1,176 p.
- Le Centenaire de la Révolution. Paris: La Documentation française, 1989. (Collection «Les Médias et l'Événement»)
- Topographie du socialisme français, 1889-1890. Montréal: 1991.
- L'Œuvre poétique du Savon du Congo. Paris: Éditions des Cendres, 1992.
- L'Utopie collectiviste. Le Grand récit socialiste sous la Deuxième Internationale. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1993.
- La Propagande socialiste: six essais d'analyse du discours. Montréal: Éditions Balzac, 1996.
- "Un Juif trahira" : l'espionnage militaire dans la propagande antisémitique 1884-1894. Montréal: CIADEST, 1994. Rpt. Montreal, 2003.
- Les idéologies du ressentiment. Essai. Montréal: XYZ Éditeur, 1996. (Prix « Spirale » de l’Essai 1996).
- La Critique au service de la révolution. Leuven: Peeters & Paris: Vrin, 2000.
- La démocratie c'est le mal, Québec, Presses de l'Université Laval, 2003.
- Antimilitarisme, idéologie et utopie, Québec, Presses de l'Université Laval, 2003.
- Rhétorique de l'anti-socialisme, Québec, Presses de l'Université Laval, 2004.
- Le Marxisme dans les Grands récits, Paris-Québec, L'Harmattan-PUL, 2005.
- Dialogues de sourds: traité de rhétorique antilogique, Paris, Mille et une nuits/Fayard, 2008.
- Vivre dans l'histoire au 20e siècle, Montréal, Discours social, 2008.
- Gnose et millénarisme ; deux concepts pour le vingtième siècle, Montréal, Discours social, 2008.
- En quoi sommes-nous encore pieux, Presses de l'Université Laval, 2009.
- L'immunité française envers le fascisme, Montréal: Discours social, 2009.
- El discurso social, Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI, 2010.
Awards and honours
- 1985 - Fellow of the Royal Society of CanadaRoyal Society of CanadaThe Royal Society of Canada , may also operate under the more descriptive name RSC: The Academies of Arts, Humanities and Sciences of Canada , is the oldest association of scientists and scholars in Canada...
- 1987 - Killam Fellowship (Canada CouncilCanada CouncilThe Canada Council for the Arts, commonly called the Canada Council, is a Crown Corporation established in 1957 to act as an arts council of the government of Canada, created to foster and promote the study and enjoyment of, and the production of works in, the arts. It funds Canadian artists and...
) - 1996 - Prix André-Laurendeau
- 1996 - Prix Spirale Eva-Le-Grand
- 2005 - Prix Léon-GérinPrix Léon-GérinThe Prix Léon-Gérin is an award by the Government of Quebec that is part of the Prix du Québec, which "goes to researchers in one of the social sciences". It is named in honour of Léon Gérin.-Winners:-References:*...