by VANESSA GUIGNERY
In the fall of 2001, I was in Normandy with author Julian Barnes to take part in an event around his most successful novel, Flaubert’s Parrot (1984), when he told me with a wry smile that I would soon be going to Austin, Texas. As I looked at him quizzically, he explained that he had decided to place his archive at the Harry Ransom Center. At that time, I had completed my doctoral thesis on “Postmodernism and modes of blurring in Julian Barnes’s fiction” at the University of La Sorbonne in Paris and published books and articles of literary analysis of Barnes’s work, but I had never examined a writer’s archive and I had never been to the United States. [Read more…] about Inspiration and insight in the papers of author Julian Barnes