Gerald J. Prince (born November 7, 1942 in
Alexandria, Egypt
Alexandria ( or ; ar, ٱلْإِسْكَنْدَرِيَّةُ ; grc-gre, Αλεξάνδρεια, Alexándria) is the second largest city in Egypt, and the largest city on the Mediterranean coast. Founded in by Alexander the Great, Alexandria ...
) is an American academic and literary theoretician. He is Professor of Romance Languages at the
University of Pennsylvania
The University of Pennsylvania (also known as Penn or UPenn) is a Private university, private research university in Philadelphia. It is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and is ranked among the highest- ...
, where he is also affiliated with department of Linguistics and the Program in Comparative Literature, and with the
Annenberg School for Communication.
Prince received his Ph.D. from
Brown University
Brown University is a private research university in Providence, Rhode Island. Brown is the seventh-oldest institution of higher education in the United States, founded in 1764 as the College in the English Colony of Rhode Island and Providenc ...
(1968). He is a leading scholar of narrative poetics, and has helped to shape the discipline of
narratology
Narratology is the study of narrative and narrative structure and the ways that these affect human perception. It is an anglicisation of French ''narratologie'', coined by Tzvetan Todorov (''Grammaire du Décaméron'', 1969). Its theoretical li ...
, developing key concepts such as the narratee, narrativity, the disnarrated, and narrative grammar. In addition to his theoretical work, he is a distinguished critic of
contemporary French literature
This article is about French literature from the year 2000 to the present day.
Overview
The economic, political and social crises of contemporary France -terrorism, violence, immigration, unemployment, racism, etc.—and (for some) the notion ...
, and is regarded as an authority on the French novel of the twentieth century.
Prince's writings in French and English have been translated into many other languages, and he has been a Visiting Professor at universities in France, Belgium, Italy, Australia, and Canada, as well as the United States. He is the General Editor of the "Stages" series at the
University of Nebraska Press
The University of Nebraska Press, also known as UNP, was founded in 1941 and is an academic publisher of scholarly and general-interest books. The press is under the auspices of the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, the main campus of the Unive ...
, and he serves on more than a dozen other editorial and advisory boards. In 2013 he received the Wayne C. Booth Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Society for the Study of Narrative, an organization that he presided in 2007.
Bibliography
*''Métaphysique et technique dans l'oeuvre romanesque de Sartre''. Geneva: Droz, 1968.
*''A Grammar of Stories''. Berlin: Mouton, 1973.
*''Narratology: The Form and Functioning of Narrative''. Berlin: Mouton, 1982.
*''A Dictionary of Narratology''. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987.
*''Narrative as Theme: Studies in French Fiction''. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992.
*''Alteratives''. Co-edited with Warren Motte. Lexington: French Forum, 1993.
*''Autobiography, Historiography, and Rhetoric''. Co-edited with Mary Donaldson-Evans and Lucienne Frappier-Mazur. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994.
*''Corps/Décors: Femmes, Orgies, Parodies''. Co-edited with Catherine Nesci and Gretchen Van Slyke. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999.
*''Eroticisms/Érotismes''. Co-edited with Roger Célestin and Éliane DalMolin. Special issue of ''Sites'', vol. 6, no. 1, 2002.
*''Guide du roman de langue française (1901-1950)''. Lanham: University Press of America, 2002.
*''Résurgence/Oubli''. Co-edited with Sabrinelle Bedrane and Bruno Blanckeman. Special issue of ''French Forum'', vol. 41. no. 1-2, 2016.
*''Geographical Narratology'' (special issue of ''Frontiers of Narrative Studies'', vol. 4, no. 2, 2018.
*''Guide du roman de langue française (1951-2000)''. Paris: Vérone, 2019.
References
Further reading
* Vincent B. Leitch, American Literary Criticism from the Thirties to the Eighties. New York: Columbia UP, 1988, pp. 248–49.
* Irena Makaryk, ed., Encyclopedia of Contemporary Literary Theory. Toronto: U of Toronto Press, 1993, pp. 448–49.
{{DEFAULTSORT:Prince, Gerald
1942 births
Living people
American literary theorists
University of Pennsylvania faculty