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Do Intellectuals (Still) Matter?

Join The Honors College
for
Do Intellectuals (Still) Matter?
A Conversation on Albert Camus and Jacques Derrida

with
Robert Zaretsky and David Mikics

Wednesday, January 27, 2010, at 4-5:30 PM
The Honors College Commons
(Refreshments will be served)

David Mikics published Who Was Jacques Derrida? An Intellectual Biography with Yale in 2009. Morris Dickstein commented that "David Mikics is the real thing, a gifted, polymathic reader," who "writ[es] not as a polemicist but as a humane interpretive critic." Publishers Weekly called the book "insightful and blessedly readable," and Martin McQuillan, who chose it as the London Times Higher Education Book of the Week, wrote, "I applaud Mikics' intellectual curiosity and open-mindedness...he shows himself to be a reader of considerable range and sensitivity." Mikics' New Handbook of Literary Terms has just been issued in paperback by Yale. His next book, The Art of the Sonnet (co-written with Stephen Burt), is forthcoming in March from Harvard.

Robert Zaretsky is author, most recently, of Albert Camus: Elements of a Life (Cornell) and, with Alice Conklin and Sarah Fishman, France and its Empire Since 1870 (Oxford). The Philosophers' Quarrel: Hume, Rousseau and the Limits of Human Understanding, which he co-wrote with John Scott, will be released in paperback in February by Yale. Rod Kedward commented that Albert Camus: Elements of a Life presents "Camus the moralist at his most human and humane," in a "dramatic and often poetic book," and Jeffrey Isaac wrote, "Zaretsky interprets Camus in a way that is both intellectually sharp and deeply personal. This is a thoughtful and beautifully written book."