Genette was instrumental in reintroducing a rich vocabulary of rhetorical terms, such as trope and metonymy, into literary criticism. His foundational work on narrative theory, notably "Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method," has been highly influential in shaping how we analyze stories. Through his multi-part "Figures" series and his trilogy exploring textual transcendence, he provided critical frameworks that continue to resonate. Although his work is often discussed in secondary analyses rather than studied in isolation, concepts like 'paratext' and 'hypotext' originating from his scholarship have become widespread tools for literary interpretation.
Includes eighteen pieces which are concerned either with universal aesthetic problems or with specific moments in the work of a well-known writer or artist. This title contains material related to the appreciation of beauty by one of the subtlest and original minds working in aesthetics.
A palimpsest is "a written document, usually on vellum or parchment, that has been written upon several times, often with remnants of erased writing still visible". Originally published in France in 1982, Gerard Genette's PALIMPSESTS examines the manifold relationships a text may have with prior texts on the same document.
In Narrative Discourse Revisited Genette both answers critics of the earlier work and provides a better-defined, richer, and more systematic view of narrative form and functioning. This book not only clarifies some of the more complex issues in the study of narrative but also provides a vivid tableau of the development of narratology over the decade between the two works.
Gerard Genette builds a systematic theory of narrative upon an anlaysis of the writings of Marcel Proust, particularly 'Remembrance of Things Past.'Adopting what is essentially a structuralist approach, the author identifies and names the basic constituents and techniques of narrative and illustrates them by referring to literary works in many languages.