From Doctoral Student to University Professor: The Trajectory of a Brilliant Career

Abstract

I have the sad distinction of being the only surviving faculty member of the Department of French and Romance Philology who has personally known Michael Riffaterre from the time, in 1953, when he set foot on American soil as a doctoral candidate until his retirement as University Professor in 2004. In those early days, we took some of the same graduate courses and began teaching at the same time, sharing the two sections of the same elementary course in French at the Columbia School of General Studies. From the outset, he stood out from the other graduate students as an exceptionally gifted, learned, and brilliant young scholar and as a teacher ideally equipped to introduce his sharply defined literary approach, with its strong focus on the primacy of text over author, as exemplified by his award-winning doctoral dissertation, published in 1957 under the title of Le Style des Pleiades de Gobineau; Essai d'application d'une methode stylistique, followed by numerous notable publications, among others Semiotics of Poetry (1978), Text Production (1983), Fictional Truth (1990), in addition to countless noteworthy articles. From the moment Michael stepped on these shores, shortly after World War II, he fell in love with the United States, eagerly subscribing to the notion of the American dream. He not only embraced with great enthusiasm his adopted country but promptly became a New Yorker with a keen appreciation of its toughness, ethnic diversity, and multicultural offerings. That he promptly changed his name from the ambiguous Michel to Michael is another indication of his determination to become fully Americanized. He also made it a point not only to master the English language, both oral and written, but also to acquaint himself thoroughly with Anglophone literature, a strong and abiding interest reflected in a number of important lectures and publications. Michael Riffaterre was fanatically devoted to Columbia University and remained fiercely loyal to it through decades of its tumultuous history. A political conservative at heart, he did not sympathize with the 1968 student rebellion and resented the havoc it brought to the campus. Throughout that whole episode, he persisted in teaching his courses in his classrooms in spite of all the heckling and picket lines. He soon acquired a mastery of the networks of underground tunnels which enabled him to elude the melee of cops and protesters. Yet, paradoxically, on the esthetic and literary level he welcomed nothing more than a vigorous controversy or a provocative debate and always strongly identified with the avant-garde, notably with structuralism, intertextuality and the surrealist movement. …