What a pleasure! This is a new form, a new genre.
— Fredric Jameson, Duke University

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Read samples below on French philosopher Léon Brunschvicg (reading Pascal, Descartes & Montaigne) and French essayist Michel de Montaigne.

Read Jonathan Rosenbaum’s review at Mubi.
Read Michael Wood’s review in the London Review of Books.
Read Stuart Liebman’s review in Cineaste.


442 pages
sewn paperback
$40 USD
sewn hardcover
$100 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.


    Read two sample entries from the volume: Timothy Barnard on the French philosopher Léon Brunschvicg and Mark Cohen on French essayist Michel de Montaigne.

  • Léon Brunschvicg
  • Michel de Montaigne

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. November 2023. 6 x 9 in., indexes & bibliography. Library PDF, ISBN 978-1-927852-49-1. Bound editions printed and bound in Sweden on premium Swedish book paper with sewn binding. Paperback, ISBN 978-1-927852-46-0, $40. Hardcover, full cloth boards, colour printed end papers, ISBN 978-1-927852-47-7, $100.

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