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Genette, Gerard. Figures of Literary Discourse, trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982. xix + 303 pp.
Long recognized as constituting one of the most important contributions to the development of French literary structuralism, Gérard Genette's work has nonetheless been less well known in this country than that of Roland Barthes and Tzvetan Todorov, for several works of these latter structuralists appeared in English in the seventies (even in the sixties), while the first book-length English translation from Genette's work (Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, Cornell University Press) appeared only in 1980. This lamentable lacuna in Anglo-American access to Genette's thought is now being remedied by translation projects undertaken by more than one major American university press. The present volume is admirably done, for it is very well translated and is, moreover, provided with both an introductory essay (by Marie-Rose Logan) which attempts to locate Genette's work within the history of literary theory and an index, lacking in the French volumes on which it draws.
As more of Genette's work becomes legible in English, it may become increasingly apparent how inadequate is the label "structuralist" for the description of a speculative and critical project extraordinary for its ability to elude the standard categories of recent literary theory. In fact, Genette has more recently come to be described with the label "post-structuralist," a largely uninformative term indicating simply that the party so labelled continues to do something after, and predicated upon, what many literary theorists take to be the demise of structuralism. It might well be more telling to describe Genette's project as semiotic, for Genette not only conceives it as paralleling that of semiotics (repeated explicit allusions make this clear), but also returns again and again to reflect on both central and marginal episodes in the history of semiotics and to criticize the nature of contemporary semiotic study. (Indeed, in some ways Genette's work may be more sympathetic to many students of semiotics than Barthes's semiology, of which more below.) In the essays translated in the Columbia Press volume, taken from books Genette published between 1966 and 1972, he several times in various forms calls for a basic reorientation (with respect to Barthesian semiology) of the study of the sign, raising theoretical...