Lucien Goldmann 1913 – 1970
Lucien Goldmann was a Romanian-born French Marxist philosopher and literary theorist and the principal architect of what he called genetic structuralism. After early studies in Bucharest and Vienna and a long apprenticeship as the literary secretary of the young Lukacs, he settled in Paris, where he held positions at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes and at the Institute of Sociology of Brussels. His Hidden God, on the tragic vision of Pascal and Racine in their Jansenist setting, his Towards a Sociology of the Novel, and the late Marxisme et sciences humaines applied his characteristic method of reading great works as the conscious expression of social classes.
Key facts
- Nationality
- Romanian-French
- Era
- Contemporary
- Movements
- Marxism, Continental
Selected quotes
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Attributed to Lucien Goldmann:
“The world view of a class is the matrix of its great cultural works.”
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Attributed to Lucien Goldmann:
“Pascal's tragic vision rests on the Jansenist refusal of compromise.”
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Attributed to Lucien Goldmann:
“Literature is a privileged crystallization of historical consciousness.”
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Attributed to Lucien Goldmann:
“Genetic structuralism reads the work as the work of a collective subject.”
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Attributed to Lucien Goldmann:
“The wager is the form of every authentic faith.”