The Poverty of Structuralism: Literature and Structuralist Theory - Couverture rigide

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 0582066972 ISBN 13 : 9780582066977

Editeur : Pearson Education Limited, 1991

Synopsis

(A study of structuralist theory from the powerful ideas of Saussure around 1910 to some of the odder claims of British cultural theorists in the 1970s and 1980s. It explains what Saussure actually claimed about language, while he was still alive, and still a linguist; and how the structuralist model of language developed, and dominated European linguistics for around 40 years; until transformational-generative grammar came along in the 1950s and 1960s and swept it away, just before French literary structuralism got off the ground. It differentiates Saussure's own theories of linguistics (and their development within linguistics up to Roman Jakobson) from the idealist philosophy of language fathered on him by the French structuralists in the 1960s, which is separately treated in this book. It explains briefly how literary structuralism arose - not in France, but in Prague in the 1930s - and how structuralism became French, in the anthropology of Levi-Strauss in the 40s, and in the psychoanalytic appropriation of some of Saussure's terminology by Jacques Lacan in the 1950s. It thus dispels the normal misunderstanding of the general reader and some English departments, that sees structuralism as a French invention of the 1960s, with Saussure's posthumous book of 1916 as sole precursor. It discusses the new developments in France in the 1960s, including the fateful confrontation with French philosophy of the subject, that turned Saussure into an idealist philosopher, and made structuralism briefly into a popular philosophy that superseded existentialism. It shows that the 1960s, far from seeing the birth of structuralism, were the years in which the structuralist model broke down and was abandoned; leaving behind it the quite different and slightly bizarre set of approaches influenced by Lacan, Althusser, Derrida, Foucault and others, and often called post-structuralist)

A propos du livre

Présentation de l'éditeur

The Poverty of Structuralism is the first in a sequence of volumes which examine in turn the basic ideas of Saussure, Marx and Freud, and analyse the way in which they have been developed and applied to art, culture and modern textual theory. The text offers a critical introduction to the structuralist foundations of modern literary theory. It gives an account of the way such foundations have been developed, twisted and distorted to become part of the language that contemporary literary and cultural theoreticians use. It also addresses some of the fundamental issues about language and society that are presupposed by the often difficult language of modern literary and cultural theory.

Revue de presse

"This is an appealing book written in an engaging style which will be accessible to undergraduates as academics." Year's work in Critical and Cultural Theory

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Pearson Education Limited
• Date d'édition: 1991
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 0582066972
• ISBN 13: 9780582066977
• Reliure: Relié
• Nombre de pages: 384
• Éditeur: Jackson Leonard
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible