syllepsis.[1] Kvas observes three phases in Riffaterre's work: stylistic, semiotic, and the intertextual phase.[2] The most important is his intertextual phase in which he develops his understanding of intertextuality. For Riffaterre, "intertextuality is not a felicitous surplus, the privilege of a good memory or a classical education. The term indeed refers to an operation of the reader's mind, but it is an obligatory one, necessary to any textual decoding. Intertextuality necessarily complements our experience of textuality. It is the perception that our reading of the text cannot be complete or satisfactory without going through the intertext, that the text does not".[3] According to the literary theorist Kornelije Kvas, "the key concept of Riffaterre's theory – intertextuality – is actually a method of text interpretation through which structures or poetic signs are recognized in the text that make the text literary. Intertextuality is a hermeneutic means of discovering the meaning of the poem, which strictly regulates the ways of the reader's perception of poetic signs. As in the case of the semiotic phase of his understanding of poetry, Riffaterre's intertextual phase is more like a theory of the interpretation of poetry than a theory of poetry itself".[4]
Biography
He was born in
Limousin region of France. After receiving the concours général prize in French literature he went on to study at the University of Lyon. After World War II he entered the Sorbonne, where he earned his M.A. in classics in 1947, and then became a doctoral student at Columbia University, earning his Ph.D. there in 1955, and remained for his entire academic career. He served as the chairman of the Department of French from 1974-1983. In 1982 he became a University Professor, the highest professorial rank at Columbia. He retired in 2004 and died in his home in New York City
Riffaterre’s theoretical work has been adopted and adapted in other research fields outside literary theory. For example, Christensen (2016)[6] introduces some of Riffaterre’s concepts to the analysis of work practice at a hospital.
Works
Le Style des Pleiades de Gobineau: Essai d'application d'une methode stylistique (1957); doctoral dissertation
Essais de stylistique structurale (1971); translated by Daniel Delas
Semiotics of Poetry (1978)
La Production du texte (1979) 1983 English translation Text Production
^Christensen, L.R. (2016). On Intertext in Chemotherapy: an Ethnography of Text in Medical Practice. Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW): The Journal of Collaborative Computing and Work Practices. Volume 25, Issue 1, pp 1-38
