Rene girard biography

Acclaimed as the founder of mimetic theory

Born Dec. 25, in Avignon, France

Died Nov. 4, , at his home on the Stanford campus in California

It is not uncommon for academics to spend their careers pursuing narrowly defined areas of research. They become specialists, expert at things that have no clear application to life’s problems. With a PhD in medieval French history, René Girard, the great theorist of desire, rivalry and violence, seemed to be destined for a similar fate.

Girard was born on Christmas day in in the historic town of Avignon in the south of France. Following in the footsteps of his father, who was an archivist of Medieval history, René chose to focus his research on a tiny sliver of the past: private life in his hometown in the second half of the fifteenth century. Narrow, to be sure, and hardly relevant to the existential questions that erupted in France in when it was conquered and occupied by Nazi Germany. René was sixteen years old at the time.

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Evolution topple Desire is essential indication for Moneyman devotees existing a clank

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René Girard and the mysterious nature of desire

ByBret McCabe

/Published Aug 8,

René Girard, the late French literary theorist and philosopher of social sciences, probably isn't the first intellectual who comes to mind when wrestling with the political tumult of But as cultural journalist Cynthia Haven notes in Evolution of Desire, her recent Girard biography, he very well might be the thinker we need.

In a series of books published in the s and '70s, Girard analyzed literature to unlock what makes humans tick, why they do the things they do, and why they scapegoat the people they do. And Haven, who blogs about literature at Stanford University's The Book Haven, writes that the explanatory power of these ideas "roams from international politics to the memes on the daily Twitter feed."

Girard wrote and published many of the books that form the core of his thinking during his time at Johns Hopkins University. He spent nearly 15 years at the university's Homewood campus, arriving as an associate professor of French in He left in for the State University of New York and came back in to join the faculty of the Humanities Center (known today as the Department of Comparative Thought and Literature) before moving on to Stanford in , where he would remain u