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Gerard Genette. The Architext: An Introduction. Trans. Jane E. Lewin. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. xi + 91 pp. $24.95 cloth; $13.00 paper.Among Anglo-American theorists of criticism, Gerard Genette is no doubt chiefly known as a narratologist: his Narrative Discourse (1972) has become the standard reference in the field, synthesizing as it does virtually all work on formal theories of narrative that preceded it, and providing a starting-point for all narratological study since then.(1) This side of the language barrier, unfortunately, there is less awareness of Genette's equally fundamental contributions to other areas of literary theory.(2) Now, however, his important study in the theory of genres has appeared in English, finally, more than a decade after its publication as a book, Introduction a l'architexte (1979), which reprinted in revised and enlarged form an essay--Genres, 'types,' modes--which had appeared in the journal Poetique in 1977.Though The Architext makes a contribution to genre-theory just as significant as the one that Narrative Discourse makes to narratology, it is not the same kind of book as the latter, largely because the theoretical situation in the two areas of poetics is so different. In narrative studies, a great deal of work (particularly on formal aspects of narrative) had already been done by the end of the 1960s, and the pressing need at the time was to provide, first, a critical synthesis of the ideas and discoveries arising from various, highly productive traditions of narrative analysis (formalist, structuralist, semiotic, Aristotelian, Jamesian, etc.) and, second, a new program of narratological research--a dual task which Narrative Discourse triumphantly fulfilled. In regard to the theory of genres, by contrast, the prospect offering itself to a theorist is not the same at all, involving as it does a widespread, deeply entrenched practice of using (or appealing to) terms like  alongside an extensive but disconnected series of theoretical reflections attemptin...

Book Reviews -- the Architext: An Introduction by Gerard Genette and Translated by Jane E. Lewin