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The Geneva School Of Literary Criticism

By Nicholas Birns
This short piece serves as a pendant to my 2014 MLQ article The System Cannot
Withstand Close Scrutiny, where I discuss the extent to which the Geneva School
influenced American criticism of the 1960s.

The Geneva School, or the critics of consciousness, was the principal European school
of criticism between 1950 and 1970. It played a mediating role in the US academy
between the era of new criticism and that of deconstructive criticism, though this was not
a general trend, only occurring in the careers of a few prominent academics such as J.
Hillis Miller. Much as in the case of Russian formalism, the influence of the Geneva
School was more concomitant with deconstruction, which in terms of intellectual history
categorically supervened it, than a predecessor but it was made into a predecessor to
suture the otherwise disjunctive narrative by which deconstruction, quite unpredictably,
became established as the predominant critical mode in the Anglophone academy. The
Geneva School was largely composed of French-speaking Swiss or Belgians, and in a
way the premonitory role they played for postmodern criticism was not unlike what the
German-speaking Swiss Bodmer and Breitinger had done for romantic criticism, and
displayed the aversion to nationalistic zeal that Auerbach had tacitly so regretted in the
work of the nineteenth-century German-Swiss novelists. Like their distant Swiss
predecessors, they emphasized an altruistic freedom and a constructive imagination,
though it was an imaginative cognition rigorously constructed in the phenomenological

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bracketings of Husserl. The Geneva critics sought an authorial consciousness; one that
had nothing to do with the authors biographyin this way their technique was very
different from the psychobiography practiced by critics such as the American Gamaliel
Bradford (1863-1932)-- but was latent in the text. Their sense of the authors strong,
albeit limited ontological presence in the work was very different from the stress of the
new criticism on the autotelic, the object sans an author. Although without any manifest
creed, there was a sense of transcendence-through-immanence in the Geneva school, a
sense that the reader's encounter with an authorial cogito, or sense of reflective self, was
very nearly a sacred one. They had a similar sense of contingency and vulnerability as did
Sartre, but lacked both his irreverence and his Marxist leanings. Albert Beguin (19101957) wrote about a range of modern poets; it is important to realize that for all their
dignified reticence, the Geneva critics artistic taste was as close to Breton as it was to
Valery. Marcel Raymond (1897-1981) wrote a book tracing French poetry from
Baudelaire to Surrealism that saw this trajectory as a triumphant progress, not a
degeneration. Jean-Pierre Richard (1922- ) was the fiction specialist of the Geneva
school, writing on Proust, Stendhal, and Flaubert as well as African American literature;
Richard was the most versatile of the Geneva school and the one whose work was most in
dialogue with other schools of theory that became more chic. Jean Rousset (1919-2002)
wrote mainly about Renaissance and Baroque figures, broadening the Geneva schools
critical scope so as not to become a mere publicist for a certain vision of modernity in
which romanticism and modernism lived in a state of decorous amity. The Belgian
Georges Poulet (1902-1991) famously wrote about Proust. His term Proustian space
perhaps introduced the use of the word space into criticism in the way it later became

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frequently used, e.g. gendered space. Though Poulet pointed out how intimately
associated people and places are in Proust, that his nostalgia, his love, is equally and
indissociably for both, Poulet was not an apostle of spatial form in a way that would
restrict temporality, and his apprehension of the synchronic field was matched by an
existential sense of temporality, not unlike that in the early-to-middle de man. Often
caricatured as somber and inflexible, Poulet actually wrote with a subtle sense of fun,
perhaps a side effect of the true intimacy he gained with his long-dead subjects. The
youngest Geneva critic so far was Jean Starobinski (1920-

) whose reconsideration of

rousseau (Jean-Jacques Rousseau, la transparence et l'obstacle, 1957) did far more than
Derrida and de Man's friendly wrangling over Rousseaus self-consciousness did to put
Rousseau back on the serious literary map, no longer a caricature of Romantic navet.
Starobinski's Montaigne en mouvement (1982; translated as Montaigne in Motion)
ingeniously linked Montaigne's love of literature to his love of friendship, particularly
with tienne de la Botie (1530-1563). This epitomized the Geneva Schools nonreductive linkage of literary structures to felt emotional states, without being reductive
with respect to either. Starobinskis medical training added an extra element of precision
and poise that served to reticulate his empathetic affect for great writers of the past (his
subjects also included diderot) whom he neither monumentalized nor mocked. The
deconstructive school made more waves at the time, but Starobinski's example might well
be the practical inheritance that critics of the twenty-first century take from the Geneva
School.

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Bibliography

Cryle, Peter. Playful Theory: Georges Poulet's Phenomenological Thematics. Culture,

Theory, and Critique 49, no. 1 (Apr. 2008): 21-34.
Lawall, Sarah. Critics of Consciousness: The Existential Structures of Literature.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968.
Parini, Jay. Reading Starobiski Reading. The Hudson Review 43, no. 3 (Autumn
1990): 498-502.