Keith Reader (1945–2022)

Abstract

The death of Keith Reader in July 2022 is a sad loss for French studies in the UK. Keith was a wonderfully rich and insightful scholar who contributed prolifically to the discipline across an astonishingly diverse range of subjects. He was exceptionally erudite; even more importantly, he was an intellectual in every sense of the word, although he would have been quick to deprecate the application of the term to himself. Keith was himself possessed of an acutely probing mind; moreover, he was keenly convinced both of the value of intellectual enquiry in itself and the importance of the broader social contribution it can make. Born in Tunbridge Wells, Keith grew up in Crawley before going to Cambridge in 1964 to study for a BA in French. However, it was an experience there outside the halls of academia that proved a real watershed in his life. The syllabus that awaited him at university was wholly devoted to language and literature, in line with most modern languages programmes at the time; while he found it somewhat narrow and dreary, albeit less for its content than for how it was taught, the discovery of film in the three independent cinemas then existing in Cambridge was to prove the beginning of a passion that would last throughout his life. That early hunger that drove him to supplement his studies with a field manifestly of relevance to his chosen academic discipline, although with little institutional recognition (let alone legitimation) of the connections between them, found a parallel in his next experience as a student, when he enthusiastically embraced whatever little—mainly anglophone—theory was on offer in the context of the graduate course in General and Comparative Literature in which he enrolled at Oxford. That enthusiasm heralded the determination with which he used the years he spent as a lecteur in Caen and then in Paris to engage with the French variety of theory, becoming one of the very first UK scholars to explore the world peopled by Barthes, Lacan, Foucault, Derrida, and Althusser, this last still a very visible presence in the École normale supérieure during Keith’s period there.