Michael Riffaterre

Background

Michael Riffaterre was born on November 20, 1924, in France. He was the son of Camille and Marie Riffaterre.

Education

In 1941, Riffaterre attended the University of Lyons in France, and from 1945 to 1950 he studied at the University of Paris. In 1947, Riffaterre studied in Sorbonne where he received a license in literature and certificate in 1952. In 1955, he received Ph.D. from Columbia University.

Career

He started teaching at Columbia as an instructor in 1953, became an assistant professor of French in 1955, full professor in 1964, Blanche W. Knopf professor in 1975, university professor (the highest faculty rank at Columbia) in 1982, and university professor emeritus in 2004. Riffaterre literally devoted his life to the study of literature, but not in the usual sense of a scholar analyzing verbal works of art in light of the history of their reception, or in terms of their aesthetics, or their role in the development of ideologies.

His study of the limits of interpretation has led him to define difficulty in reading as a key to understanding (for instance, the automatic writing of the Surrealists), and, in his Fictional Truth (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), to develop the notion of a grammar of literature. In addition to these books, Riffaterre is the author of more than 130 articles. He was chairman of the Columbia French Department from 1974-1983, director of the School of Criticism and Theory from 1987-1997, general editor of The Romanic Review from 1971-2000, and held visiting positions at Johns Hopkins, the Collège de France, Yale, Harvard, CUNY and Penn. He was an officer in the French order of the Palmes académiques, and held honorary doctorates from the Université Blaise-Pascal and from the Sorbonne.

Achievements

• Michael Riffaterre was one of Columbia's greatest and most devoted scholars and teachers. During his more than fifty years at the University, he was an inspiring mentor to countless undergraduates and graduate students. He was also a major international figure in literary studies, a leader in the growth of structural criticism, and a powerful advocate for understanding literature through its impact on its readers.

Works

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  • Semiotics of Poetry

    (In Semiotics of Poetry, Michael Riffaterre proposes a sta...)

    1978
  • Text Production 1983
  • Fictional Truth 1990
  • Essais de stylistique structurale 1971
  • La production du texte 1979

Views

Riffaterre had chosen not to study literature as it constitutes a corpus, or a distinctive period, but rather to analyze the literariness of literature and to replace the history of literature with its theory. That is to say, describing the processes through which a text becomes a work of art. His teaching and scholarly publications bear upon explaining the impact of the text, the durability of the literary work despite the evolution of taste, and the role of the reader, particularly in so far as that role appears governed by mechanisms which control the reader’s interpretation to a degree where the writer’s opinion of his or her work tends to become irrelevant. Relevancy is maintained in the forms of the work of art and through linguistic and semiotic processes impervious to the accidents of the work’s reception.

Membership

Riffaterre was twice a Guggenheim fellow, was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a senior fellow of the University of Oxford.

Personality

Quotes from others about the person

• “Few modem American critics have made contributions as important to the formal study of literature in general, and the understanding of French literature in particular, as Michael Riffaterre,” praised Stamos Metzidakis in the Dictionary of Literary Biography

Connections

On May 15, 1965, Riffaterre married Hermine Bilfeld. They had two children: Lee and Jason.

Father:

Camille Riffaterre

Mother:

Marie Riffaterre

Spouse:

Hermine Bilfeld

Son:

Lee Riffaterre

Son:

Jason Riffaterre

References

• The Pursuit of Signs To gain a deeper understanding of the literary movement that has dominated recent Anglo-American literary criticism, The Pursuit of Signs is a must. In a world increasingly mediated, it offers insights into our ways of consuming texts that are both brilliant and bold. Dancing through semiotics, reader-response criticism, the value of the apostrophe and much more, Jonathan Culler opens up for every reader the closed world of literary criticism. Its impact on first publication, in 1981, was immense; now, as Mieke Bal notes, 'the book has the same urgency and acuity that it had then', though today it has even wider implications: 'with the interdisciplinary turn taking hold, literary theory itself, through this book, becomes a much more widespread tool for cultural analysis'.
  1981