SOURCE: Culler, Jonathan. “Bachelard's Images.” In Framing the Sign: Criticism and Its Institutions, pp. 96-106. Norman, Okla.: University of Oklahoma Press, 1988.

In the following essay, Culler judges Bachelard's overall contribution to science and literary criticism, contending that “the diversity of his accomplishments makes Bachelard difficult to assess and contributes to the neglect of his ideas.”

At the time of his death in 1962, Gaston Bachelard was France's leading historian and philosopher of science as well as one of its most original and influential literary critics; but to pupils and colleagues he was a moral and philosophic example, a patriarch, majestically bearded, who had mastered the art of happiness and practiced it among books and friends. Rejecting Existentialism and its cognates with the simple credo, ‘L'angoisse est factice’ [anguish is factitious] he taught the delights of poetic reverie and the difficult beauties of mathematical physics as the two principal strains...