About Michael Riffaterre
Michel Riffaterre (French pronunciation: [miʃɛl ʁifatɛʁ]; 20 November 1924 in Bourganeuf, Creuse – 27 May 2006 in New York), known as Michael Riffaterre, was an influential French literary critic and theorist. He pursued a generally structuralist approach. He is well known in particular for his book Semiotics of Poetry, and his conceptions of hypogram and syllepsis. Kornelije Kvas observes three phases in Riffaterre's work: stylistic, semiotic, and the intertextual phase. 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". 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".
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