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“... debate? This publication of the first substantial English translation from the critical work of Gérard Genette is at least a move in the right direction, though Narrative Discourse is not by any means a text in the idiom of Deconstruction. Originally published as the major part of Genette’s third collection of ...”

“... compromise would be hard to find between these two positions, but Socrates advances one, as Gérard Genette brings out in a typically rigorous analysis of the dialogue. Socrates emerges from it in the end as a ‘disappointed Cratylist’: his thesis is that whoever first gave things their names did a poor job on the whole, since so many of the ...”

“... have got it wrong. French intellectuals have long been fascinated by Christie’s novel: Barthes, Gérard Genette, Algirdas Julien Greimas and Robbe-Grillet have all discussed it, and Perec was writing about it ‘on the eve of his death’. Bayard’s solution, a perfectly valid reading, is, remarkably, much more satisfying than Poirot’s. If you find ...”

“... than passing mention. Bloom is sui generis, but he is also wholly American, wholly un-English. Genette, though by any unprejudiced standard an extraordinarily fine critic, is also interested in systematic literary theory – though it is an opinion now strongly maintained in this country that the second part of that statement flatly contradicts the ...”

“... better readings possible. Thus it is with the most perceptive of the French narrative analysts, Gérard Genette. He uses Proust as a reservoir of illustrations for his narrative poetics: but he also uses that poetics as a set of instruments for giving ‘a more precise description of Proustian narrative in its particularity’. This second operation is ...”

“... literature is a history of all this love,’ the ‘unseen scaffolding’ of an artist’s work. Gérard Genette called the paratextual elements of a book – the cover, title page, footnotes and so on – its ‘threshold’, but what if they are its scaffolding? What is holding up these made-up stories if not all of us, who believe in them, write ...”

“... and the order in which Conrad chooses to present them. Watt uses it, and also its development by Gérard Genette. Characteristically, he doesn’t go far with that theorist’s beautifully articulated descriptions of ‘achrony’ (‘any narrative order which is not co-ordinate with that of the occurrence of the events of the story’), but he ...”

“... The seminar included graduate students fresh from Paris, from the classrooms of Barthes and Gérard Genette, who had so elegantly explained ‘anachrony’ and the way narrative can defy chronology. In Genette’s analepses, prolepses, syllepses and the like in ‘classical’ narrative Johnson could summon ...”

“... by a sense of prodigious but futile labour – ‘du temps perdu à la recherche’, as Gérard Genette mischievously put it. You might feel frustrated, too, by the editorial strategy of the project as a whole. The overall sequence is chronological, but each component period is treated alphabetically. This means that the constituency histories ...”

“... in person and online, about sequels, continuations, adaptations and completions. ‘The sequel,’ Gérard Genette wrote in Palimpsests, ‘differs from a continuation in that it continues a work not in order to bring it to a close but, on the contrary, in order to take it beyond what was initially considered to be its ending. The motive is generally a ...”

“... any superior unmethodical intelligence might produce. Wayne Booth has a handsome essay on Gérard Genette as a rhetorician. But most of the others are gruff. Scruton implies that you’d need to be demented to propound what Derrida calls Grammatology, and goes on to defend the idea of tradition, the rights of the common reader, and ‘the ...”

“... Kristeva on Mallarmé, Edward Said on Jane Austen, Paul de Man on Proust, Gilles Deleuze on Kafka, Gérard Genette on Flaubert, Hélène Cixous on Joyce, Harold Bloom on Wallace Stevens, J. Hillis Miller on Henry James. Some theorists are slapdash readers, but so are some non-theoretical critics. Derrida is so perversely myopic a reader, doggedly pursuing ...”

“... the anthology, it can be praised for its selection of essays, including particularly fine ones by Gérard Genette, Roland Barthes, Michael Riffaterre, and Todorov himself. A substantive collection that is not similarly guilty of sexism is Peter Caws’s issue of Social Research entitled ‘Current French Philosophy’.* In addition to exemplary essays ...”

“... not to admire the ingenuity of such major narratological practitioners as Roland Barthes and Gérard Genette. In Forster’s Aspects of the Novel the only other passage as famous as the one about flat and round characters is the one that distinguishes between story and plot. He makes it sound simple. Time and the narratologists have shown that it is ...”