2008 — Gérard Genette
The International Society for the Study of Narrative is delighted to confer its 2008 Wayne C. Booth Lifetime Achievement Award on Gérard Genette.
Genette’s rich, stimulating, and trailblazing examination of narrative in works like “Frontiers of Narrative,” Narrative Discourse, and Narrative Discourse Revisited made him narratology’s preeminent figure. We are all indebted to the concepts, tools, and terms he devised and elaborated—from homodiegetic and heterodiegetic narrative to iterative frequency or metalepsis—and much present narrative inquiry would simply be inconceivable without his contributions. An outstanding narratologist, Genette is also a dazzling critic who pioneered literary structuralism and who has given us superb readings of Proust, Flaubert, Robbe-Grillet, and many others. He is a brilliant theorist of genre, who defined and elucidated mimology, a brilliant student of the palimpsestuous character of (narrative or nonnarrative) literary texts and of the form and force of paratextual elements, a brilliant aesthetician who has illuminated the nature and function of artworks. Most generally, as his Figures series exemplifies, he has been an indefatigable explorer of the space between signifier and signified, expression and meaning, text and thought.
Just as much as the remarkable paths he has opened and the remarkable results he has achieved, Genette’s very manner is admirable. His ability to integrate knowledge while questioning received thinking, to combine close reading and theoretical farsightedness, to trace synchronic configurations as well as diachronic deployments, to interrogate not only the extant but also the possible, as well as his gift for joining method and openness, rigor and playfulness, esprit de finesse and esprit de géométrie are everywhere manifest in his work. They make him an incomparable critic, narratologist, and poetician.
For over fifty years Gérard Genette has met the highest standards of intellectual activity. The Narrative Society is proud to give him its Lifetime Achievement Award.
-- Gerald Prince