Michael Riffatere was born in France in 1942. He studied at the University of Lyon and the University of paris in the 1940s. He then emigrated to the United States and completed his doctorate at Columbia University in New York in 1955. The thesis he defended at the time, entitled Le style des Plẻiades de Gobineau: Essai d’application d’une methode stylistique, won the Ansley Award and was published in 1957 by the university press. He taught at the university New York until 1964, when he was granted a chair at Columbia University, where he was teaching ever since. A member of the American Academy of Art and Sciences, he has been editor of romanic review and was director of the School of Theory and Criticism at Dartmouth College for 10 years. He has published five books to date, and nearly a hundred articles in various books and journals, writing in both French and English.A large of Riffaterre’s writings deals with poetic language. He attempts to define the nature of literary texts and he observes how they function. For Riffaterre, literary communication is an experience whose uniqueness is rooted in the specefic stylistic features of the work, maifested by presence of ungramaticalities. As he says in Text production ( 1983 [1979]), this uniquiness of the literary text is the simplest definition of word literariness. Moreover, the poetic text funtions by deploying many variants centered on an unvarying nucleus: the hypo-gram, which is the process that generates the text.
According to The New York Times, Riffaterre was a renowned authority on semiotics — the study and classification of signs and linguistic symbols, systems of signs, how those signs relate to that which they refer and the subsequent perceptions from which communication and literary discourse occur. He focused on the processes by which literature becomes a work of art and its permanence in the face of evolving tastes, irrespective of tertiary issues to the text like historical context or authorial intent, politics and ideology.
One of the foremost advocates of French structuralist literary theory in the United States, Riffaterre’s most prominent works include Semiotics of Poetry, Essais de Stylistique Structurale, Fictional Truth and Text Production. Riffaterre twice received the Guggenheim fellowship, was a senior fellow of Oxford University and general editor of the Romanic Review for nearly three decades until 2000.
Provost Alan Brinkley said, “Riffaterre was one of Columbia’s greatest and most devoted scholars and teachers … 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.”
Born and predominantly educated in France, a member of the French Resistance and veteran of the French army in WWII, Riffaterre was appointed to the Columbia faculty in 1955, the same year he earned a Ph.D. in French literature from GSAS. He is survived by his wife, Hermine; son, Jason; daughter, Lee ’86L; and two grandchildren.
