Gerald J. Prince (born November 7, 1942, in Alexandria, Egypt) is an American academic and literary theoretician. He is Professor of Romance Languages at the University of Pennsylvania,[1] 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 (1968). He is a leading scholar of narrative poetics, and has helped to shape the discipline of narratology, developing key concepts such as the narratee, narrativity, the disnarrated, and narrative grammar.[2] In addition to his theoretical work, he is a distinguished critic of contemporary French literature, and is regarded as an authority on the French novel of the twentieth century.[3]
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,[4] 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,[5] an organization that he presided in 2007.