French theorist Gérard Genette is best known for his considerable contribution to the theory of narrative. Beginning with the publication of his groundbreaking Figures in 1966, Genette has committed a lifetime of scholarship to establishing a system for understanding how a literary text "works." His single-minded, meticulously detailed scholarship of how the structures of a text (rhetorical, linguistic, semiotic) convey meaning has substantially broadened fields of study in literature, genre, and aesthetics generally. He continues to teach, research, and publish theoretical books and articles that shape, refine, and redefine the study of the nature, form, and function of narrative (regardless of medium of representation) known by literary critics as the "poetics" of the text, or "narratology."

Gérard Genette was born in 1930 in Paris. After passing his agrégation (highest level competitive teacher's exam) in lettres classiques (classical letters) at the Ecole Normale Supé...