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Michael or Michel Riffaterre was an influential French literary critic and theorist. He pursued a generally structuralist approach. He is well known in particular for his book Semiotics of Poetry, and the concepts of hypogram and syllepsis.
He was born in Bourganeuf, in the Limousin region of France. After receiving the concours général prize in French literature he went on to study at the University of Lyon. After World War II he entered the Sorbonne, where he earned his M.A. 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. He served as the chairman of the Department of French from 1974-1983. In 1982 he became a University Professor, the highest professorial rank at Columbia.
Riffaterre was a Guggenheim Fellow twice, a fellow at Oxford, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, an officer in the order of the palmes académiques, and held honorary degrees from the Université Blaise-Pascal as well as the Sorbonne. 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. He is a past president of the Semiotic Society of America.
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