Here is an unexpected Gerard Genette, looking back at his life and time with humour, tenderness and lucidity. 'Bardadrac' is the neologism a friend of his once invented to name the jumbled contents of her handbag. A way of saying that one finds a little bit of everything in this book: memories of a suburban childhood, a provincial adolescence and early years in Paris marked by a few political commitments; the evocation of great intellectual figures, like Roland Barthes or Jorge Luis Borges; a taste for cities, rivers, women and music, classical or jazz; contingent epiphanies; good or bad ideas; true and false memories; aesthetic biases; geographical reveries; secret or apocryphal quotations; maxims and characters; asides, quips and digressions; reflections on literature and language, with an ironic take on the medialect, or dialect of the media; and other surprises.

At the intersection, for instance, of Flaubert's Dictionary of Received Ideas, Ambrose Bierce's Devil's Dictionary, Renard's Journal, Roland Barthes' Roland Barthes and Perec's I Remember, this whimsical abecedarium invites you to stroll and gather.

Gerard Genette (1930-2018) was research director at the Ecole des hautes etudes en sciences sociales in Paris, and visiting professor at Yale University. Cofounder of the journal Poetique, he published extensively in the fields of literary theory, poetics and aesthetics, including, in English: Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method (1980), Figures of Literary Discourse (1982), Fiction and Diction (1993), Mimologics (1995), Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree (1997), Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation (1997), The Work of Art: Immanence and Transcendence (1997), The Aesthetic Relation (1999), Essays in Aesthetics (2005).

About the Author
Nick Levett was born in Derby in 1971 and has a DPhil in contemporary French thought (University of Sussex). He lives in Brighton. Gerard Genette (7 June 1930 - 11 May 2018) was a French literary theorist, associated in particular with the structuralist movement and such figures as Roland Barthes and Claude Levi-Strauss, from whom he adapted the concept of bricolage.


Book Information
ISBN 9781802078022
Author Nicholas Levett
Format Hardback
Page Count 480
Imprint Liverpool University Press
Publisher Liverpool University Press