ABSTRACT
Like the American New Criticism of the 1940s, the Geneva School practiced close reading and promoted stylistic analysis that was based on the intimate relationship between the structure of a text and its meaning. However, unlike New Criticism, the Geneva School was also committed to looking outside the text, taking into account intentionalit, readers reactions, and even historical and cultural contexts. Even though it did not promote a collective-and dogmatic-program of thought, the Geneva School did not hide its focuses of interest. The anti-positivist approach of the Geneva School treated history no better than it did biography. Starobinski is professionally, the most representative theoretician and practitioner of the discipline within the Geneva School because of his work on the history of medicine, which he always incorporated into the specifically literary field. The Geneva School took the gamble of keeping hold of both ends of the chain: the immediacy of consciousness and the mediations of the work.
