Gérard Bessette

Gérard Bessette (25 February 1920 – 21 February 2005) was a Canadian writer and educator.

Bessette was born in Sainte-Anne-de-Sabrevois, Quebec, and grew up in Montreal. He attended the Collège Saint-Ignace. He continued his studies at the Université de Montréal, where in 1950 he completed his doctorate entitled Images in French-Canadian poetry.

Unable to obtain an academic position in Quebec because of his atheism, he taught at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh from 1951 to 1957. He then found a job in Kingston, Ontario, first at Royal Military College of Canada in 1958, and then in the Department of French Studies at Queen's University from 1959 to 1979. Bessette's novels L'incubation (1965) and Le cycle (1971) won the Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction (French). In 1980 he was awarded the Prix Athanase-David, Quebec's highest literary honour.

Several of Bessette's works address issues that led to and were representative of the Révolution tranquille, a series of societal shifts that took place in Quebec during the 1960s, which saw increased secularization and a general movement away from the influence of the Catholic Church. His earlier works are written in a realistic style, while his later novels employ elements of the nouveau roman literary movement and tend to be more experimental. His literary criticism is noted for its Freudian readings of Québécois literature.

One of his most noted works is Le libraire (1960), an existential tale of a book store employee in a small Quebec town in the 1950s. The book deals with one of Bessette's most common themes: the stifling culture of Quebec of that time. His work was also part of the literature event in the art competition at the 1948 Summer Olympics.^[1]

He died on Kingston, Ontario, on 21 February 2005.

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Gérard Bessette

Bibliography

Novels

Essays

Other

Awards and honours

References

External links

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