How Long to Read French Lessons

How Long Does it Take to Read French Lessons?

It takes the average reader 3 hours and 41 minutes to read French Lessons by Alice Yaeger Kaplan

Assuming a reading speed of 250 words per minute. Learn more

Description

Brilliantly uniting the personal and the critical, French Lessons is a powerful autobiographical experiment. It tells the story of an American woman escaping into the French language and of a scholar and teacher coming to grips with her history of learning. Kaplan begins with a distinctly American quest for an imaginary France of the intelligence. But soon her infatuation with all things French comes up against the dark, unimagined recesses of French political and cultural life. The daughter of a Jewish lawyer who prosecuted Nazi war criminals at Nuremburg, Kaplan grew up in the 1960s in the Midwest. After her father's death when she was seven, French became her way of "leaving home" and finding herself in another language and culture. In spare, midwestern prose, by turns intimate and wry, Kaplan describes how, as a student in a Swiss boarding school and later in a junior year abroad in Bordeaux, she passionately sought the French "r," attentively honed her accent, and learned the idioms of her French lover. When, as a graduate student, her passion for French culture turned to the elegance and sophistication of its intellectual life, she found herself drawn to the language and style of the novelist Louis-Ferdinand Celine. At the same time she was repulsed by his anti-Semitism. At Yale in the late 70s, during the heyday of deconstruction she chose to transgress its apolitical purity and work on a subject "that made history impossible to ignore:" French fascist intellectuals. Kaplan's discussion of the "de Man affair" — the discovery that her brilliant and charismatic Yale professor had written compromising articles for the pro-Nazi Belgian press—and her personal account of the paradoxes of deconstruction are among the most compelling available on this subject. French Lessons belongs in the company of Sartre's Words and the memoirs of Nathalie Sarraute, Annie Ernaux, and Eva Hoffman. No book so engrossingly conveys both the excitement of learning and the moral dilemmas of the intellectual life.

How long is French Lessons?

French Lessons by Alice Yaeger Kaplan is 221 pages long, and a total of 55,471 words.

This makes it 75% the length of the average book. It also has 68% more words than the average book.

How Long Does it Take to Read French Lessons Aloud?

The average oral reading speed is 183 words per minute. This means it takes 5 hours and 3 minutes to read French Lessons aloud.

What Reading Level is French Lessons?

French Lessons is suitable for students ages 12 and up.

Note that there may be other factors that effect this rating besides length that are not factored in on this page. This may include things like complex language or sensitive topics not suitable for students of certain ages.

When deciding what to show young students always use your best judgement and consult a professional.

Where Can I Buy French Lessons?

French Lessons by Alice Yaeger Kaplan is sold by several retailers and bookshops. However, Read Time works with Amazon to provide an easier way to purchase books.

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