“... of signs’. This link had been forged by two formalists of a very different sort, the Russians Roman Jakobson and Yury Tynyanov, who were not only close to modernist artists but also crucial to the subsequent development of structuralism by Claude Lévi-Strauss and others (Lévi-Strauss, alas, didn’t share their modernist commitments). In effect ...”

“... Surrealists were less help than another friend he made in New York, the exiled Russian linguist Roman Jakobson. Listening to Jakobson lecture was like reading ‘a detective story’. Jakobson introduced him to Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics of 1916, and to the idea ...”

“... shortly after the announcement of the poet’s death, one of his friends, the great linguist Roman Jakobson, wrote that suicide was an act Mayakovsky had long contemplated and repeatedly articulated in his most intense poems, an act at once intimately personal and bound up with the tragedy of an entire generation. Mayakovsky was the embodiment of a ...”

“... the revolution of 1905. Her grandfather Nikolai Yakovlev was a linguist and a colleague of Roman Jakobson (Yakovlev spoke 11 or 23 languages, depending on which of Petrushevskaya’s accounts you believe). Her grandmother was courted by Vladimir Mayakovsky (he called her ‘the Blue Duchess’) and, she tells us, edited the Great Soviet ...”

“... Modern Writing (1977) Lodge worked mainly with the version of Structuralism which he derived from Roman Jakobson’s distinction between metaphor and metonymy. The distinction was already fairly clear in Vico’s The New Science (1725), but Jakobson developed it much further in considering the symptoms of aphasia, a ...”

“... eyes opened wide.’In later years, Acker often said that she had studied linguistics under Roman Jakobson. This wasn’t true, Kraus thinks: Jakobson taught at Harvard, which didn’t take girls until the mid-1970s. Acker applied to Radcliffe, and was, Kraus writes, ‘stunned’ to be rejected. Her second ...”

“... cusp of a different era, as do the various references to Freud, Sade, écriture, and the nouveau roman. These are the terms of entry into the critical-theoretical mood of the early Seventies and take us to the last of the three volumes published so far. The historical crossroads is of course 1968, the time of the Langlois affair (his dismissal by André ...”

“... only in philosophical backgrounds, but in its focus, which goes beyond the ‘Yale School’ to Jakobson, Macherey, Althusser, Barthes and Foucault on the Continental side, and Leavis, Empson, Eagleton, Jameson, Culler, Said, Rorty and others on the Anglo-American side. Wittgenstein’s relation to language and scepticism is too skimpily treated: but at ...”

“... but it is by no means easy to make out what he thinks it to be.) Formalism, whether practised by Jakobson, Todorov, Barthes, Derrida, Gombrich, or even the (once) New Critics, is the enemy, an ‘Opaque’ mode to be countered by what Nuttall calls ‘Transparent’ criticism, an approach which apparently can, if necessary, ‘do all the things done by the ...”

“... black in Barthes’s handwriting: Tout ceci doit être considéré comme dit par un personnage de roman. What follows is text and pictures, a fractured autobiography, a dictionary of personal themes, arranged alphabetically. A fiction? Not exactly. Barthes on the page is a character in the novel of his life, not because he is an invented or rearranged ...”

“... Western Europe and America were the principal, though not exclusive, gainers: in linguistics, Jakobson and Trubetskoy; in history, Rostovtsev, Vernadsky, Postan; in economics, Leontief and Domar; in anthropology, Shirokogorov; in sociology, Sorokin; in philosophy, Koyré and Kojève. Other names could be added. Once Stalin was gone, dissidents within ...”