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30% off for a limited time: With purchase of Reading with Jean-Luc Godard at the regular price, take 30% off Jean-Luc Godard’s Introduction to a True History of Cinema and Television ($35 USD), and/or The André Bazin Reader ($60 CAD individuals), and/or Montage, Découpage, Mise en scène: Essays on Film Form ($30 USD), with no additional shipping charges in Canada, the USA, the UK or Europe. Get Montage, Découpage, Mise en scène free with puchase of the Reading with hardcover. All details here.

Read samples from the book below on Ezra Pound and François Truffaut.

What a pleasure! This is a new form, a new genre, distantly related, no doubt, to the journal, in which we browse in search of this or that idiosyncratic reflection of an unpredictable culture producer in off hours, in her leisure noting down thoughts you would not necessarily wish to share with other people, let alone the public at large. And yet, we must admit that Godard really does wish to share them. Insofar as all these references constitute and name random moments in the intellectual life of Godard, they offer ways, not to understand him (how could anyone possibly do that?), but rather to live a moment inside one of his thoughts, however insubstantial and ephemeral. It is a great privilege to be able to do so.
— Fredric Jameson, Duke University


442 pages
sewn paperback
$50 USD
sewn hardcover
$110 USD

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Recommend to a librarian

Reading with Jean-Luc Godard

edited by Timothy Barnard and Kevin J. Hayes (University of Central Oklahoma emeritus)
with a Preface and a Coda by Fredric Jameson

Books are central to the work of Jean-Luc Godard, avid reader of pulp fiction and philosophical treatises, classical drama and modernist novels, scientific tomes and Maoist doctrine, comic books and volumes of art history. Books inform Godard’s thinking and inspire his work in a manner unlike that of any other filmmaker. Godard and his characters quote from books incessantly, altering and inflecting them in ways which provide an entry into his thoughts and his aesthetic, derived in large part from its literary component.

How are viewers of his films to navigate this dizzying subterranean world of quotations, adaptations, references, homages and borrowings? In this one-of-a-kind volume, 50 specialists working in a dozen countries engage with 109 individual books by 90 authors found over nearly 70 years of Godard’s films and writings. Each of these readable three-page mini-essays explores a corner of the extraordinary breadth and depth of Godard’s reading, introducing the volume to the reader and unlocking its importance to Godard. Reading with Jean-Luc Godard is not only an invaluable tool for the study of Godard’s films; it sheds new light on cinema’s longstanding dialogue with the printed word and makes an original and lively contribution to writing the history of ideas.

With his usual penetration and erudition, Fredric Jameson contributes both a Preface and a Coda to bookend Reading with Jean-Luc Godard. An extensive bibliography rounds out the volume to encourage readers to seek out some of the books they will discover and want to explore on their own as they read along with Godard.

442 pp. 28 November 2023. Sewn paperback, ISBN 978-1-927852-46-0, $50. Sewn hardcover, full cloth boards, colour printed end papers, ISBN 978-1-927852-47-7, $110.

Authors discussed in the volume (authors with more than one entry are in italics):

Alleg ◦ Aragon ◦ Ardrey ◦ Arendt ◦ Aron ◦ Badiou ◦ Balzac ◦ Baraka ◦ Bardèche & Brasillach ◦ Bataille ◦ Baudelaire ◦ Bazin ◦ Beckett ◦ Benayoun ◦ Bergson ◦ Blanchot ◦ Borges ◦ Brecht ◦ Bresson ◦ Breton ◦ Broch ◦ Brunschvicg ◦ Bukowski ◦ Caumery & Pinchon ◦ Chandler ◦ Cheyney ◦ Cleaver ◦ Cocteau ◦ Darwish ◦ Debord ◦ Descartes ◦ Dolto ◦ Dostoevsky ◦ Duras ◦ Eliot ◦ Éluard ◦ Faulkner ◦ Faure ◦ Flaubert ◦ Forton ◦ Gébé ◦ Genet ◦ Giraudoux ◦ Goodis ◦ Green ◦ Heidegger ◦ Langlois ◦ Levinas ◦ London ◦ Malraux ◦ Mann ◦ Mao ◦ Marquand ◦ Matheson ◦ McCoy ◦ Melville ◦ Montaigne ◦ Moravia ◦ Mourlet ◦ Musset ◦ Nizhny ◦ Ovid ◦ Pasolini ◦ Péguy ◦ Peisson ◦ Poe ◦ Pound ◦ Prokosch ◦ Proust ◦ Queneau ◦ Quentin ◦ Ramuz ◦ Reverdy ◦ Rimbaud ◦ Rivette ◦ Rocha ◦ Rohmer ◦ Rossellini ◦ Sacotte ◦ Sartre ◦ Shakespeare ◦ Shannon ◦ Truffaut ◦ Valéry ◦ van Vogt ◦ Villiers ◦ Watson ◦ Weil ◦ Wittgenstein ◦ Woolf