SOURCE: Smith, Roch C. “Gaston Bachelard and Critical Discourse: The Philosopher of Science as Reader.” Stanford French Review 5, no. 2 (fall 1981): 217-28.

In the following essay, Smith provides an assessment of Bachelard's contribution to critical discourse.

Usually original, often provocative, Bachelard's quarter century of work on the literary imagination has itself caught the imagination of numerous critics and imitators who would apply his approach to other texts. This is particularly true of his works on the imagination of elements, or simply the “Elements,” as I shall call them here.¹ Some of the early adaptations of Bachelard's Elements may seem somewhat rigid or naive to us now.² But despite numerous attempts to determine Bachelard's influence on critical discourse, including Vincent Therrien's heroic endeavor to document Bachelard's “revolution in literary criticism,” by identifying eight critical methods in his work,³ the specific nature of Bachelard's contribution remains frustratingly elusive. For some, Bachelard...