Gérard Genette facts for kids

Gérard Genette (born June 7, 1930, died May 11, 2018) was a famous French expert in literary theory. This means he studied how stories are told and how books are put together. He was connected to a way of thinking called structuralism. Other famous structuralists included Roland Barthes and Claude Lévi-Strauss. Genette even used some of their ideas, like bricolage, in his own work.

Life of Gérard Genette

Gérard Genette was born in Paris, France. He went to school at the Lycée Lakanal and the École Normale Supérieure. He also studied at the University of Paris.

Later, in 1967, he became a professor of French literature at the Sorbonne.

In 1970, Genette helped start a journal called Poétique with Hélène Cixous and Tzvetan Todorov. He also edited a series of books with the same name.

Genette held many important jobs. He was a research director at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales. He also taught as a visiting professor at Yale University in the United States.

Genette's Work on Literary Theory

Gérard Genette helped bring back many old terms used to describe writing. These terms, like trope (a figure of speech) and metonymy (using a related word to mean something else), are part of rhetoric.

His most important work is about how stories are told, which is called narrative. His ideas are well-known in English through his book Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. This book is actually part of a larger series called Figures.

Genette also wrote a group of three books about how texts relate to each other. This group includes Introduction à l'architexte (1979), Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree (1982), and Paratexts. Thresholds of Interpretation (1997).

While his ideas are very important, his work is often studied as part of bigger collections. However, many of his terms and methods are now used widely. For example, he created the term paratext. This refers to things that go along with a main text, like introductions, pictures, or prefaces. Another term he used is hypotext, which means the original source text that another text is based on.

Key Ideas in Genette's Narratology

Genette's ideas about how stories work come from his book Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. This book is part of his bigger work, Figures I-III. He used examples mostly from Marcel Proust's long novel, In Search of Lost Time.

Some people used to say that studying narratives could only work for simple stories. But Genette showed it could work even for complex books like Proust's.

Below are five main ideas Genette used in Narrative Discourse. These ideas help us look at the structure of stories, not just what they mean.

Order of Events in a Story

The 'order' looks at how the events in a story are arranged compared to when they actually happened.

Imagine a story where:

• Event A: A detective finds clues about a murder.
• Event B: The details of the murder are finally revealed.
• Event C: The murderer is caught.

Chronologically, the events happened in this order: B (murder details), then A (clues found), then C (murderer caught).

But in the story, they might be told as: A (clues found), then B (a flashback to the murder details), then C (the solution).

Genette called these changes in order 'anachrony'. This helps us understand things like flashbacks (looking back) and flash-forwards (looking ahead) in stories.

Frequency of Events and Narration

'Frequency' looks at how many times an event happens and how many times it is told in the story.

There are a few possibilities:

• Singular: An event happens once and is told once.
  • Example: "Today I went to the shop."
• Iterative: An event happens many times but is told only once.
  • Example: "I used to go to the shop every day."
• Repetitive: An event happens once but is told many times.
  • Example: "Today I went to the shop," and later, "He said, 'Today I went to the shop.'"
• Multiple: An event happens many times and is told many times.
  • Example: "I used to go to the shop," and "He used to go to the shop," and "I went to the shop yesterday."

Duration of Story and Narration Time

'Duration' compares the actual time an event takes in the story to the time it takes to read about it.

• Long narrative time, short discourse time:
  • Example: "Five years passed." This describes a long time in the story, but you read it in a second.
• Short narrative time, long discourse time:
  • Example: James Joyce's novel Ulysses tells a story that happens in just 24 hours. But it takes a very long time to read the book.

Voice: Who is Telling the Story?

'Voice' is about who is narrating the story and from where. There are four main types:

• Where is the narration coming from?
  • Intra-diegetic: The narrator is inside the story world.
    • Example: Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White, where different characters tell parts of the story.
  • Extra-diegetic: The narrator is outside the story world.
    • Example: Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles, where a narrator tells the story from an outside view.
• Is the narrator a character in the story?
  • Hetero-diegetic: The narrator is not a character in the story.
    • Example: Homer's The Odyssey, where the narrator is not part of the adventure.
  • Homo-diegetic: The narrator is a character in the story.
    • Example: Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights, where a character like Lockwood tells much of the tale.

Mood: How the Story is Told

Genette said that the 'mood' of a story depends on how close or far away the narrator is. It also depends on the narrator's 'perspective'.

The narrator's 'distance' can change depending on how speech is presented. For example, is it direct speech, reported speech, or summarized speech?

The narrator's 'perspective' is called focalization. Stories can be:

• Non-focalized: The narrator knows everything.
• Internally focalized: The story is told through the eyes of one character.
• Externally focalized: The narrator only describes what can be seen or heard, like a camera.

Awards and Honors

• Officer of the Order of Arts and Letters (2016) – This is a special award from France for people who have done great things in the arts and literature.

Selected Works

• Figures I-III, 1967-70
• Mimologiques: voyage en Cratylie, 1976
• Introduction à l'architexte, 1979
• Palimpsestes: La littérature au second degré, 1982
• Nouveau discours du récit, 1983
• Seuils, 1987
• Fiction et diction, 1991
• L'Œuvre de l'art, 1: Immanence et transcendence, 1994
• L'Œuvre de l'art, 2: La relation esthétique, 1997
• Figures IV, 1999
• Figures V, 2002
• Métalepse: De la figure à la fiction, 2004
• Bardadrac, 2006
• Discours du récit, Paris, Le Seuil, 2007
• Codicille, Paris, Le Seuil, 2009
• Apostille, Paris, Le Seuil, 2012
• Épilogue, Paris, Le Seuil, 2014
• Postscript, Paris, Le Seuil, 2016

See also

In Spanish: Gérard Genette para niños

• Hypertext (semiotics)
• Hypotext
• Narrativity