Genette

Gérard Genette (1930–2018) was a French literary theorist and a leading figure in narratology, the systematic study of how narratives are structured and received. Building on structuralism, he extended formal analysis to literature across genres and languages, influencing generations of scholars. He taught at French universities and produced a body of work that helped formalize methods for analyzing how stories are told and how readers experience them.

Genette distinguished between récit (story) and discourse (discourse), examining how the narrative is told rather than what is told. He introduced levels of narration, focalisation, and the categories of order, duration, and frequency to describe how time is manipulated in narration. He developed concepts of narrateur (narrator) and narrataire (focal listener/reader), and explored metafictional techniques and intertextual relations through terms such as palimpseste (palimpsest) and métalepsis (metalepsis). He also formulated the concept of paratextes (paratexts), distinguishing texts that accompany the main work, such as titles, prefaces, and other bordering elements, from the interior text itself.

Key works include Figures du sens (1966), Le Discours du récit (The Narrative Discourse: An Essay on Method, 1972), and Palimpsests (Palimpsestes, 1982); plus Paratextes: Thresholds (1987). His writings on narrative time, focalization, and the function of paratexts have had a lasting influence on literary theory, textual criticism, and the study of textuality, shaping subsequent debates in narratology and comparative literature.