Gérard Genette

Paratexts are those liminal devices and conventions, both within and outside the book, that form part of the complex mediation between book, author, publisher, and reader: titles, forewords, epigraphs, and publishers' jacket copy are part of a book's private and public history. In Paratexts, an English translation of Seuils, Gerard Genette shows how the special pragmatic status of paratextual declarations requires a carefully calibrated analysis of their illocutionary force. With clarity, precision, and an extraordinary range of reference, Paratexts constitutes an encyclopedic survey of the customs and institutions of the Republic of Letters as they are revealed in the borderlands of the text. Genette presents a global view of these liminal mediations and the logic of their relation to the reading public by studying each element as a literary function. Richard Macksey's foreword describes how the poetics of paratexts interacts with more general questions of literature as a cultural institution, and situates Genette's work in contemporary literary theory.

Do words - their sounds and shapes, their lengths and patterns - imitate the world? Mimology says they do. First argued in Plato's Cratylus more than two thousand years ago, mimology has left an important mark in virtually every major art and artistic theory thereafter. Fascinating and many-faceted, mimology is the basis of language sciences and incites occasional hilarity. Its complicated traditions require a sure grip but a light touch. One of the few scholars capable of giving mimology such genial attention is Gerard Genette. Genette treats matters as basic and staid as the alphabet and as reverberating as the letter R in ur-linguistics.

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.

By definition, 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." Palimpsests (originally published in France in 1982), one of Gerard Genette's most important works, examines the manifold relationships a text may have with prior texts. Genette describes the multiple ways a later text asks readers to read or remember an earlier one. In this regard, he treats the history and nature of parody, antinovels, pastiches, caricatures, commentary, allusion, imitations, and other textual relations.

Genette uses Proust's Remembrance of Things Past as a work to identify and name the basic constituents and techniques of narrative. Genette illustrates the examples by referring to other literary works. His systemic theory of narrative deals with the structure of fiction, including fictional devices that go unnoticed and whose implications fulfill the Western narrative tradition.

What art is--its very nature--is the subject of this book by one of the most distinguished continental theorists writing today. Informed by the aesthetics of Nelson Goodman and referring to a wide range of cultures, contexts, and media, The Work of Art seeks to discover, explain, and define how art exists and how it works. To this end, Gérard Genette explores the distinction between a work of art's immanence--its physical presence--and transcendence--the experience it induces. That experience may go far beyond the object itself. Genette situates art within the broad realm of human practices, extending from the fine arts of music, painting, sculpture, and literature to humbler but no less fertile fields such as haute couture and the culinary arts. His discussion touches on a rich array of examples and is bolstered by an extensive knowledge of the technology involved in producing and disseminating a work of art, regardless of whether that dissemination is by performance, reproduction, printing, or recording. Moving beyond examples, Genette proposes schemata for thinking about the different manifestations of a work of art. He also addresses the question of the artwork's duration and mutability.--Google Books description of Volume 1.

Cuando acababa de clasificar de forma aproximada la critica literaria en tres variedades —la “espontanea” de “la gente decente” (que, segun Sainte-Beuve, se practica en Paris y “conversando”); la de los “profesionales” (de la critica, se entiende); y la de los “artistas”, es decir, en este caso, los escritores mismos—, Albert Thibaudet se apresuraba a incluir en la primera, al punto de identificarlas totalmente una con la otra, a la “critica de los diarios”, esa “forma de la critica espontanea que hoy ha casi absorbido a todas las otras”. De un solo golpe, la segunda categoria, la de los criticos “profesionales”, resultaba reducida a una sola profesion, la de los profesores, de tal suerte que la clasificacion venia asi a distribuir la critica entre escritores, profesores y periodistas, estos ultimos en adelante simples amateurs aparentemente, pero tal vez habria que decir amateurs profesionales o profesionales del amateurismo.

Dans son célèbre ouvrage, Les Idées et les lettres, Etienne Gilson déplorait l'absence d'une histoire de la doctrine contenue dans le Cratyle de Platon et de sa transmission en Occident. Le propos de Gérard Genette n'est pas de combler cette lacune, ce dont il laisse le soin aux historiciens, mais plus modestement de convier le lecteur à un "voyage" à travers un certain nombre de textes peu connus, tous inspirés par cette "heureuse croyance" au cratylisme ou au mimologisme ( les deux mots sont interchangeables) c'est-à-dire à l'existence d 'une relation d 'analogie entre les mots et les choses. Le livre ne vise pas à l'exhaustivité, ni même à un recensement des principaux textes qui s'inscrivent dans le sillage du fameux d dialogue platonicien. Ce qui intéresse l'auteur c'est plus la typologie que l'histoire, plus les variantes de l'espèce que le processus de transformation ou les modalités de sa transmission. -- From (Jan. 21, 2016).