Here is an unexpected Gérard 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. Gérard Genette (1930-2018) was research director at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris, and visiting professor at Yale University. Cofounder of the journal Poétique, 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).

Here is an unexpected Gérard 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. Gérard Genette (1930-2018) was research director at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris, and visiting professor at Yale University. Cofounder of the journal Poétique, 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).

Published in 1811, Sense and Sensibility has delighted generations of readers with its masterfully crafted portrait of two sisters, Elinor and Marianne Dashwood. Forced to leave their home after their father's death, Elinor and Marianne must rely on making good marriages as their means of support. But unscrupulous cads, meddlesome matriarchs, and various guileless and artful women impinge on their chances for love and happiness. The novelist Elizabeth Bowen wrote, "The technique of [Jane Austen's novels] is beyond praise....Her mastery of the art she chose, or that chose her, is complete."

This Modern Library Paperback Classics edition contains a new Introduction by Pulitzer Prize finalist David Gates, in addition to new explanatory notes.


From the Trade Paperback edition.