Genette

Gérard Genette (born 1930) is a French literary theorist, associated in particular with the structuralist movement and such figures as Roland Barthes and Claude Lévi-Strauss, from whom he adapted the concept of bricolage.

Genette was born in Paris, where he studied at the Lycée Lakanal and the École Normale Supérieure.

After leaving the French Communist Party, Genette was a member of Socialisme ou Barbarie during 1957–8.

He received his professorship in French literature at the Sorbonne in 1967.

In 1970 he, Hélène Cixous and Tzvetan Todorov founded the journal Poétique and he edited a series of the same name for Éditions du Seuil.

Among other positions, Genette was research director at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales and a visiting professor at Yale University.

Genette is largely responsible for the reintroduction of a rhetorical vocabulary into literary criticism, for example such terms as trope and metonymy. Additionally his work on narrative, best known in English through the selection Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, has been of importance. His major work is the multi-part Figures series, of which Narrative Discourse is a section. His trilogy on textual transcendence, which has also been quite influential, is composed of Introduction à l'architexte (1979), Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree (1982), and Paratexts. Thresholds of Interpretation (1997).

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