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Is Gérard Genette a “classic,” a key figure in information and communication sciences? This paper analyzes a corpus of articles and doctoral theses in this field in order to describe this scientific community’s references to Genette from 1980 to 2018. Against his own predictions, Genette’s categories have become “nomadic concepts,” particularly in the analysis of media and social discourses. The purpose of this study is to quantitatively and qualitatively characterize the uses of references to Genette made by analysts of daily and media communication when drawing on his theoretical categories. This conceptual nomadism reveals the paradoxical relationship between a poetics aiming at literariness and a use of poetics as a tool for analyzing social discourses.