René Etiemble

René Ernest Joseph Eugène Étiemble was a French essayist, scholar, novelist, and promoter of Middle Eastern and Asian cultures. Known commonly by his family name alone, Etiemble held the coveted Chair of Comparative Literature, in 1955, at the Institute of General and Comparative Literature in the pre-1968 Sorbonne University and continued in his post as a tenured Professor at the Sorbonne-Nouvelle University from 1956 to 1978. His doctoral dissertation on the Myth of Rimbaud and his many interpreters world-wide won him fame in 1952. However, one critic thinks Étiemble's derisive tone and some ill-founded conjectures about Rimbaud's later life undermine the book's credibility today. During World War II, he taught at the University of Chicago and was attached to the Office of War Information in New York in 1943. After the war, he taught French literature at the University of Alexandria, from 1944 to 1948, and thereafter at the University of Montpellier, France. He was the author of some sixty works Among his more popular works: Connaissez-vous la Chine?, Gallimard 1964, and Quarante ans de mon maoïsme (1934-1974) Gallimard 1976.