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Where structuralism comes from

John Sturrock, 2 February 1984

Course in General Linguistics 
by Ferdinand deSaussure, translated by Roy Harris.
Duckworth, 236 pp., £24, March 1983, 0 7156 1738 9
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Semiotic Perspectives 
by Sandor Hervey.
Allen and Unwin, 273 pp., £15, September 1982, 9780044000266
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... left, the script reads, brooding on the sins of American foreign policy – it is now or never for Ferdinand deSaussure to take his place. One theorist of language at a time is probably all the popular awareness has room for, and over the past twenty years Chomsky has been it, investing grammar with a new, deep-seated ...

The [ ] walked down the street

Michael Silverstein: Saussure, 8 November 2012

Saussure 
by John Joseph.
Oxford, 780 pp., £30, March 2012, 978 0 19 969565 2
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... Ferdinand deSaussure, who died in 1913 at the age of 55, sowed the seeds of structuralist thought that first took root in linguistics, then effloresced throughout the 20th century in fields as seemingly distinct as literary criticism, architecture, social anthropology and psychoanalysis ...

Lacan’s Mirrors

Edmund Leach, 2 July 1981

The Talking Cure: Essays in Psychoanalysis and Language 
edited by Colin MacCabe.
Macmillan, 230 pp., £20, February 1981, 0 333 23560 6
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... that many of Lacan’s writings had been allowed to go out of print! The concept of stade de miroir which is of ‘crucial importance from Lacan’s viewpoint’ dates from 1936. The same commentator remarked that the best introduction to the thought of Lacan was a lecture given in 1946 which was not written in ‘the dense and hermetic style of much ...

Pairs

Maurice Bloch, 5 May 1983

The Way of the Masks 
by Claude Lévi-Strauss, translated by Sylvia Modelski.
Cape, 249 pp., £15, February 1983, 0 224 02081 1
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... linguistics was an amalgam of ideas sometimes seen as going back to the work of the Swiss linguist Ferdinand deSaussure, who himself was strongly influenced by the sociological theories of Durkheim. De Saussure’s main contribution was to show that the study of language need ...

This jellyfish can sting

Jonathan Rée, 13 November 1997

Truth: A History 
by Felipe Fernández-Armesto.
Bantam, 247 pp., £12.99, October 1997, 0 593 04140 2
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... of relativism since the Sixties, it is at least mildly interesting to learn that cynical old Ferdinand deSaussure ‘began his courses of lectures on general linguistics in Paris in 1907’. And it is diverting to be told that the ferocious Friedrich Nietzsche was a ‘sexually inexperienced invalid’ who ...

Icicles by Cynthia

Michael Wood: Ghosts, 2 January 2020

Romantic Shades and Shadows 
by Susan J. Wolfson.
Johns Hopkins, 272 pp., £50, August 2018, 978 1 4214 2554 2
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... them, or getting them to confess, and Wolfson evokes an interesting ambiguity in a remark by Paul de Man and its citation by Marjorie Garber. De Man writes of ‘making the death speak’, which in Garber’s quotation becomes ‘making the dead speak’. As Wolfson notes, the quotation has its logic and perhaps the ...

Bounce off a snap

Hal Foster: Yve-Alain Bois’s Reflections, 30 March 2023

An Oblique Autobiography 
by Yve-Alain Bois, edited by Jordan Kantor.
No Place, 375 pp., £15.99, December 2022, 978 1 949484 08 3
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... and not long afterwards he delved into Russian and Polish Constructivism as well as Dutch De Stijl. Such interests, no less than his methods, made Bois foreign to the dominant concerns of art history and criticism in France as well as the United States. His primary targets in both countries were the same: a reductive use of iconology, which ...

We do it all the time

Michael Wood: Empson’s Intentions, 4 February 2016

... fashion system. In the background, along with Jakobson and other Russians, was the Swiss linguist Ferdinand deSaussure, who in the early years of the century had taught his students that etymology and structure were two different things: his favourite analogy was chess, where the story of the game so far is ...

History as a Bunch of Flowers

James Davidson: Jacob Burckhardt, 20 August 1998

The Greeks and Greek Civilisation 
by Jacob Burckhardt, edited by Oswyn Murray, translated by Sheila Stern.
HarperCollins, 449 pp., £24.99, May 1998, 0 00 255855 6
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... Emile Durkheim and that other Swiss monument whose lectures were nearly lost to us, Ferdinand deSaussure, men of very different interests, much more serious and objective, and of a much more rigorous bent. Durkheim’s study of suicide, for instance, a foundation-stone of modern sociology, couldn’t be ...

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