Publication
"Superreader: Riffaterre revisited"
Michael Riffaterre's life's work summarised
What is it about?
A survey of Michael Riffaterre's life's work, from the early structuralist stage of the mid-1960s to the semiotics based work of the late 1970s and on, and the later work on novels.
Why is it important?
This overview of Michael Riffaterre’s work in poetics aims to trace the development of the key concepts of Semiotics of Poetry (R.1978), from his initial ‘stylistics’ phase, moving through the subsequent New Criticism and Piagetian structuralist phases. There is an account of the debate with Jakobson and Lévi-Strauss over a valid method for interpreting a Baudelaire sonnet, in the course of which several elements of the mature theory are developed. These are treated in detail in the following section on R.1978, and demonstrated in the analysis of a Gautier poem. The concept of the ‘matrix’ is seen to require modification, as it is sugggested that a single matrix cannot account for the complexity of the underlying propositional structure of the text. After touching on Riffaterre's work on narrative, the author’s work on the perception-changing effect of the modernist text is briefly discussed.
Perspectives
I was introduced to Riffaterre's work by the doyen of Japanese semantics, Prof Y. Ikegami, in 1983. Soon understanding that Riffaterre held the best available key to the interpretation of modern poetry, I initiated correspondence. I was fortunate to organise his lecture tour of Japan in late 1986, accompanying him throughout. We continued corresponding until around the date of his final publications in 1996. My published PhD dissertation (Sophia University, Tokyo, 1994) gave a detailed account of Riffaterre's research career. This article is a condensation of that work – which happened to be in French, like many of Riffaterre's own publications.