Gerard Genette, a French literary theorist born in 1930, explores structuralism in literary criticism, emphasizing its roots in linguistic and anthropological developments. He argues that methods from one discipline can be applied to another, leading to insights in narrative analysis, intertextual connections, and a broader understanding of literature as a system of signs. Genette's work underscores that literary criticism operates as metaliterature, questioning literature itself while engaging with the universe of signs.

1. Name : Baldaniya Vanita Velabhai
Sem: 2 M. A. Part 1
Roll No: 29
Paper : 7 literary Theory
&Criticism
Topic: Structuralism and Literary
Criticism by
Gerard Genette

2. IMAGE OF GERARD GENETT
 He was born 1930 (Paris) is
a French Literary theorist
 He received his
professorship in French
literature at the Sorbonne
in 1967.
 Narrative Discourse: An
Essay in Method

3.  Structuralism: it is the offshoot of certain developments in
linguistic and anthropology.
 Saussure’s mode of the synchronic study of language was an
attempt to formulate the grammar of a language from a study
of parole.
 structuralism criticism aims at forming a poetics or the science
of literature from a study of literary works.
 The best work in structuralist poetics has been done in the
field of narrative.

4.  In his essay, “structuralism and Literary
Criticism” that methods developed for the study
of one discipline could be satisfactorily applied
to the study of other discipline as well.
 This is what he calls;
“intellectual bricolage” borrowing a term
from Claude Levi-Strauss. This is precisely so, so
far as structuralism is concerned.

5.  Structuralism as a method is peculiarly imitable
to literary criticism which is a discourse upon a
discourse.
 Literary criticism in that it is metalinguistic in
character and comes into being/existence as
metaliterature.
 In his word;
“it can therefore be metaliterature, that is to
say, a literature of which literature is the imposed
object”.

6.  In Genette’s words;
“ It the writer questions the universe the
critic question literature, that is to say, the
universe of signs. But what was a sign for the
writer becomes meaning for the critic, and in
another way what was meaning for the writer
becomes a sign for the critic, ad the theme and
symbol of a certain literary nature.”

7.  1)They analyse prose narratives, relating
the text to some larger containing structure,
such as :
a) the conventions of a particular literary
genre, or
b) a network of intertextual connections or
c) a projected model of an underlying universal
narrative structure, or
d) a notion of narrative as a complex of
recurrent patterns or motifs.

8.  2)They interpret literature in terms of a
range of underlying parallels with the
structure of language, as
 described by modern linguistics. For
instance, the notion of the ‘mytheme, posited
by Levi-Strauss,
 denotion the minimal units of narrative
‘sense’ is formed on the analogy of the
morpheme which, in

9.  linguistics is the smalls nit of grammatical
sense. An example of a morpheme is the past
tense.

10.  3)They apply the concept of systematic
patterning and structuring to the whole field
of western culture,
and across culture, treating as ‘ systems of
signs’ anything from Ancient Greek myths to
brands of soup powder.

11. Listening
me
carefully
for