[1] After leaving the French Communist Party, Genette was a member of Socialisme ou Barbarie during 1957–8.

In 1970 with Hélène Cixous and Tzvetan Todorov he founded the journal Poétique[1] and he edited a series of the same name for Éditions du Seuil.

Among other positions, Genette was research director at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales[3] and a visiting professor at Yale University.

Genette is largely responsible for the reintroduction of a rhetorical vocabulary into literary criticism, for example such terms as trope and metonymy.

His trilogy on textual transcendence, which has also been quite influential, is composed of Introduction à l'architexte (1979), Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree (1982), and Paratexts.

The examples used in it are mainly drawn from Proust's epic In Search of Lost Time.

It also deals with the structure of narratives on a more systematic basis, accounting for flash-forward, simultaneity, as well as possible, if rarely used, effects.