Marc Angenot (born Brussels, 1941) is a Belgian-Canadian social theorist, historian of ideas and literary critic. He is a professor of French literature at McGill University, Montreal, and holder of the James McGill Chair of Social Discourse Theory there. He is a leading exponent of the sociocritical approach to literature.

Education

He studied at the Free University of Brussels (now split into the Université Libre de Bruxelles and the Vrije Universiteit Brussel) from 1959 to 1967. His dissertation on the rhetoric of surrealism placed him in the line of Chaïm Perelman, and the Groupe Mu of the University of Liège.

Social discourse and sociocritique

Along with Claude Duchet, Pierre V. Zima, Jacques Leenhardt, André Belleau, Jacques Dubois and Régine Robin, Angenot made use of the sociological approach to texts. His influences were Pierre Bourdieu, the Frankfurt School, and Mikhail Bakhtin. He favoured the discourse concept over the structuralist position on "text", of Gérard Genette and Tzvetan Todorov. His proposal to study the whole array of "social discourse" in a given state of society (1889: Un état du discours social, 1989) was a vast interdisciplinary project concerning the interdiscursive construction of society.

Discursive history

In parallel, Angenot developed "discursive history". Here he examined the grand narratives, but as a modernist, rather than postmodernist. He has been concerned with the nineteenth century, and representative thinkers around revolution and social struggles: Auguste Comte, Saint-Simon, Charles Fourier, Étienne Cabet, Pierre Leroux, Proudhon, the Belgian Hippolyte Colins, Jules Guesde, Georges Sorel, and others. His conclusions are on the complexities and breaks within this tradition of discourse.

Rhetoric

Angenot also published a number of books in rhetoric and argumentation, among which La Parole pamphlétaire in 1982, Rhétorique de l'anti-socialisme in 2004, and a treatise of "antilogical" rhetoric, Dialogues de sourds: Traité de rhétorique antilogique in 2008.

Publications

Awards and honours