Concept

Pierre Bayard

Summary
Pierre Bayard (pjɛʁ bajaʁ; born 1954) is professor of Literature at the University of Paris 8 and psychoanalyst. He is the author of many creative essays such as Who Killed Roger Ackroyd? (2002), How to Talk about Books You Haven't Read (2007), and Sherlock Holmes Was Wrong (2008). Pierre Bayard is the founder of "interventionist criticism", he is opposed to neutral and uncommitted criticism of literary works. In the course of his essays, he has, among other things, chased down unpunished literary criminals (due to the negligence of their creators), provided tips and tricks for talking about books and places that have not been read or seen, or reflected on the resistance/collaboration dilemma. Bayard's most popular book, How to Talk about Books You Haven't Read (Minuit, 2007), is a bestseller in France in which he engages in a study of the different ways of not reading a book, and recommends solutions to be able to talk about it anyway. Assuming that some readers have a terrifying understanding of reading, he tries to make them feel free from guilt for not having read canonical literature. The essential thing in culture being to have an overview, he claims the possibility of having a perforated and incomplete culture. Pierre Bayard has renewed this system in Comment parler des lieux où l'on n'a pas été, a work in the second degree again, in which he reviews the authors who have spoken of places they have not visited. His books have been considered as cases of "novelistic criticism", in that they present revisionist readings of famous fictional mysteries. In his 2008 book L'Affaire du Chien des Baskerville, for example, published in English as Sherlock Holmes Was Wrong: Re-opening the Case of the Hound of the Baskervilles he analyzes the famous Sherlock Holmes case, and in his earlier book Who Killed Roger Ackroyd? he re-investigates Agatha Christie's novel The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. In 2019 returned to an other book by Agatha Christie, And Then There Were None and questioned the solution delivered to the outcome of her novel.
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