Georges Poulet - Biographical Information

Biographical Information

Georges Poulet was born in Chênée, now part of Liège, Belgium in 1902. Poulet received his doctorate from the University of Liège in 1927, after which he taught at the University of Edinburgh. In 1952, Poulet became a professor of French Literature at Johns Hopkins University where he also acted as chair of the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures. He later taught at the University of Zurich and the University of Nice. Poulet died in Brussels, Belgium in 1991. His estate is archived in the Swiss Literary Archives in Bern.

Although he never taught at the University of Geneva, Poulet was associated with the Geneva School of literary criticism. He worked closely with critics such as Marcel Raymond, Albert Béguin, Jean Rousset, Jean Starobinski, and Jean-Pierre Richard. Poulet was influenced by his fellow Geneva School critics as well as by critics such as Jacques Riviere, Charles du Bos, Wilhelm Dilthey, and Friedrich Gundolf (Miller 305). Lawall (1968) identifies Poulet as "the first critic to develop Raymond’s and Beguin’s concept of experience in literature as a systematic tool of analysis. . . .He shifts their focus from the individual author to the author's generic human experience"(74).

A renowned author, Poulet published many works of literary criticism in his lifetime. Among his most famous books are the four volumes of his masterwork, Studies in Human Time. The first volume, also called Studies in Human Time, was published in France in 1949 and won the Prix Sainte-Beuve in 1950. Poulet was awarded the Grand Prix de la Critique littéraire and the French Academy’s Prix Durchon in Philosophy for the second volume, 1952’s The Interior Distance. Volume three, Le point de départ, was published in 1964. The final volume, Mesure de l’instant appeared in 1968. In these four volumes, Poulet conducts an exhaustive examination of the work of French authors such as Molière, Proust, Flaubert, and Baudelaire to find the expression of what he calls the cogito, or consciousness, of each writer (Leitch et al. 1318).