Genette

• Narrative Discourse by Gérard Genette, translated by Jane Lewin
  Blackwell, 285 pp, £9.95, June 1980, ISBN 0 631 10981 1

To judge by our literary periodicals, something is in the air this summer. The forbidding term ‘Deconstruction’, formerly whispered behind closed doors, has been flung to and fro in the public arena. British readers who had mildly hoped that the ‘challenge of Structuralism’ would simply vanish of its own accord have awoken to find a more formidably astringent dogma hotly disputed in Paris and in Yale. As Roger Poole pointed out in a recent number of this journal, they are as yet barely equipped to take part in the ‘debate being carried on … with such verve and panache’.