Michael Riffaterre

For Riffaterre,  "intertextuality is not a felicitous surplus, the privilege of a good memory or a classical education.

After receiving the concours général prize in French literature he went on to study at the University of Lyon.

in classics in 1947, and then became a doctoral student at Columbia University, earning his Ph.D. there in 1955, and remained for his entire academic career.

In addition to teaching at Columbia he held visiting professorships at Johns Hopkins, the Collège de France, Yale, Harvard, the City University of New York, and the University of Pennsylvania, and led seminars at the School of Criticism and Theory.

Riffaterre’s theoretical work has been adopted and adapted in other research fields outside literary theory.