Gérard Genette (French pronunciation: [ʒeʁaʁ ʒənɛt]; 7 June 1930 – 11 May 2018) was a French literary theorist, associated in particular with the structuralist movement and with figures such as Roland Barthes and Claude Lévi-Strauss, from whom he adapted the concept of bricolage.

[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.

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.