The Danish linguist and semiotician, Louis Hjelmslev, was born in 1899 and died on 30 May 1965. Hjelmslev, who founded the Copenhagen Linguistic Circle, attempted to render more rigorous and clear Saussure’s general theory of language and semiotics. In particular, Hjelmslev… Read More ›
Before 1960, few people in academic circles or outside had heard the name of Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913). But after 1968, European intellectual life was a-buzz with references to the father of both linguistics and structuralism. That Saussure was as… Read More ›
Born in Aleppo in 1902, Emile Benveniste was professor of linguistics at the Colle’ge de France from 1937 to 1969, when he was forced to retire due to ill-health, tragically caused by aphasia. He died in 1976. After being educated… Read More ›
Twentieth-century literary criticism and theory has comprised a broad range of tendencies and movements: a humanistic tradition, descended from nineteenth-century writers such as Matthew Arnold and continued into the twentieth century through figures such as Irving Babbitt and F. R…. Read More ›
Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) came to prominence in the late 1960s and early 1970s with the publication of Of Grammatology (1967), Writing and Difference (1967) and Margins of Philosophy (1972). Derrida’s name is inextricably linked with the term ‘deconstruction‘. Largely because… Read More ›
French literary critic, Roland Barthes (1915-1980) was a key figure both in the development of structuralism — in particular in the application of techniques derived from semiology to the analysis of everyday life and popular (as well as high) culture… Read More ›
A.J. Greimas‘ work has been an effort to analyse all forms of discourse. Greimas emphasizes the idea that language is an “assemblage of structures of signification” which implies that the language system cannot be “given” in advance but must be… Read More ›
C.S. Peirce worked on logic and semiotics (this latter term he translated from the Greek), frequently linking the two. He argued that signs are the vehicles for thought as well as the articulation of logical forms. Peirce differs from Saussure… Read More ›
One of the most distinguished thinkers in linguistics, philology and aesthetics, Jakobson was responsible for the development of semiotics as a critical practice. Since his work is extremely wide-ranging in scope, Jakobson’s contribution to semiotics and structuralism alone are discussed… Read More ›
The most important of the structural narratologists, Gerard Genette, has argued for the autonomous nature of the literary text. Genette’s work has been of particular use to literary critics for his attempts to develop models of reading texts in a… Read More ›
Eco proceeds from the Peircean assumption of “unlimited semiosis.” Though unlimited semiosis indicates that signs always refer to other signs (and that a text is open to infinite interpretations), Eco seeks a middle ground between univocal meaning and infinite meanings. For… Read More ›
Kristeva first came into prominence for her work on Bakhtin Seeking to counter the “necrophilia”as (Kristeva called it) of phenomenology and structural linguistics, she suggested “semanalysis,” a portmanteau term derived from semiology (Saussure)and psychoanalysis (Freud) to address an element beyond… Read More ›
The advent of critical theory in the post-war period, which comprised various complex disciplines like linguistics, literary criticism, Psychoanalytic criticism, structuralism, postcolonialism etc., proved hostile to the liberal consensus which reigned the realm of criticism between the 1930s and `50s. Among… Read More ›