Gérard Genette
Gérard Genette was a prominent French literary critic and theorist, born on June 7, 1930, in Paris. After completing his education at the École Normale Supérieure, he began his academic career teaching secondary school before moving on to a lecturing position at the Sorbonne in 1963. Genette is best known for his contributions to narratology, particularly through his influential work "Discours du récit" (1972), where he developed a framework for narrative analysis that distinguishes between the perception and presentation of narratives. Alongside other key figures like Tzvetan Todorov and Helene Cixous, he founded the journal "Poetique," which became a central platform for modern literary theory. His extensive writings on poetics and genre theory further solidified his reputation, especially through works like "Seuils" (1987). Recognized as a pioneer of structuralism, Genette's innovative concepts and vocabulary continue to influence literary criticism. He was honored with the Wayne C. Booth Lifetime Achievement Award by the International Society for the Study of Narrative in 2008. Genette passed away on May 11, 2018, leaving behind a significant legacy in literary theory.
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Gérard Genette
- Born: 1930
- Birthplace: Paris, France
- Died: May 11, 2018
Biography
Gérard Genette was born in Paris, France, on June 7, 1930. After graduating from the École Normale Supérieure in 1955, he taught secondary school for eight years. In 1963, he became a lecturer of French literature at the Sorbonne. Shortly after his promotion to a professor at the Sorbonne, Genette accepted a position as director of literary studies at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales.
Between 1966 and 1972, he published the first three volumes of his five-volume Figures: Essais (Figures of Literary Discourse, 1982), in which he traced the history of figures of speech and the evolution of literary theory. In 1970, Genette, Tzvetan Todorov, and Helene Cixous founded and directed the journal Poetique, which quickly became a primary forum for the discussion of modern literary critical theory. Genette and Todorov also coedited Éditions de seuil, an influential series of books on critical theory.
Genette’s reputation as a literary critic grew when he published Discours du récit (1972; Narrative Discourse: An Essay on Method, 1980). In this important and sometimes controversial work, Genette developed his model for narrative analysis, which became known as narratology. He clearly distinguished between the way a narrative is perceived and the way it is presented, essentially the concept of perception versus mood. Most subsequent studies of narrative theory frequently reference Genette’s work.
Starting in the late 1960s, Genette was a sought-after visiting professor, serving in that capacity at numerous universities, including Johns Hopkins, Yale, University of Wisconsin, New York University, and the University of California at Berkeley. In 1983, he wrote a sequel to Discours du récit, entitled Noveau discours du récit (Narrative Discourse Revisited,1988). This work further enhanced his status as an influential literary critic, especially in France and other European countries.
Genette became recognized as one of the leading theoreticians of poetics, a study of the shared or shareable properties of literary works. He wrote about the role that figures of speech play in poetics and about the elements of language that somehow imitate nonlinguistic facts. His use of rhetorical models has extended the concerns of poetics beyond its traditional focus on the metaphor and the metonym.
Genette’s philosophy recognizes the close relationship between structural theory and criticism. Along with Roland Barthes and Claude Levi-Strauss, Genette is recognized as one of the pioneers of the structuralism movement in literary criticism. Genette also wrote extensively about literary genre theory, reexamining the relationships of different texts. In his book Seuils (1987; Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, 1997), Genette explained how literary work is included in smaller texts, ranging from books and chapters to chapter titles, subtitles, and subheadings. He is well known and often cited in literary criticism for the vocabulary and techniques he originated. The International Society for the Study of Narrative granted Genette its Wayne C. Booth Lifetime Achievement Award in 2008.
Genette was married to Raymonde Debray-Genette, author of several well-regarded volumes of criticism of the works of Gustave Flaubert. Genette died on May 11, 2018, at the age of eighty-seven.
Bibliography
Buchanan, Ian. "Genette, Gérard (1930– )." A Dictionary of Critical Theory, Oxford UP, 2010, pp. 199–200.
Desrochers, Nadine, and Daniel Apollon, eds. Examining Paratextual Theory and Its Applications in Digital Culture. Information Science Reference, 2014.
"Gérard Genette (1930– )." The Columbia History of Twentieth-Century French Thought, edited by Lawrence D. Kritzman and Brian J. Reilly, translated by M. B. DeBevoise. Columbia UP, 2006, pp. 535–36.
Prince, Gerald. "2008—Gérard Genette." The International Society for the Study of Narrative, 2008, narrative.georgetown.edu/awards/booth-genette.php. Accessed 28 Nov. 2018.
Prince, Gerald. "Gérard Genette and the Pleasures of Poetics." Narrative, vol. 18, no. 1, 2010, pp. 3–7.