Author

Books by René Girard

René Girard (1923–2015) was a French-American literary critic, philosopher, and anthropologist who spent most of his career at Stanford University. His intellectual project — developing and applying mimetic theory across literature, anthropology, and religion — began with Deceit, Desire and the Novel (1961) and continued through Violence and the Sacred (1972), The Scapegoat (1982), and I See Satan Fall Like Lightning (1999). He was elected to the Académie française in 2005 and received honorary doctorates from numerous universities. His influence has spread far beyond academic literary criticism into fields including economics, psychotherapy, and political philosophy.