Beyond Pure Reason: Ferdinand De Saussure'S Philosophy Of La

Description: The Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857--1913) revolutionized the study of language, signs, and discourse in the twentieth century. He successfully reconstructed the proto-Indo-European vowel system, advanced a conception of language as a system of arbitrary signs made meaningful through kinetic interrelationships, and developed a theory of the anagram so profound it gave rise to poststructural literary criticism. The roots of these disparate, even contradictory achievements lie in the thought of Early German Romanticism, which Saussure consulted for its insight into the nature of meaning and discourse. Launching the first comprehensive analysis of Saussure's intellectual heritage, Boris Gasparov links Sassurean notions of cognition, language, and history to early Romantic theories of cognition and the transmission of cultural memory. Several fundamental categories of Saussure's philosophy of language, such as the differential nature of language, the mutability and immutability of semiotic values, and the duality of the signifier and the signified, are rooted in early Romantic theories of "progressive education" and child cognitive development. Consulting a wealth of sources only recently made available, Gasparov casts the seeming contradictions and paradoxes of Saussure's work as a genuine tension between the desire to bring linguistics and semiotics in line with modernist epistemology on the one hand, and a "Romantic" awareness of language's dynamism and its transcendence of the boundaries of categorical reasoning on the other. Advancing a radical new understanding of Saussure, Gasparov reveals aspects of Saussure's work previously overlooked by both his followers and his postmodern critics.

Review: Gasparov brings great clarity to and elaborates on the rather freely used terminology associated with Saussure, such as the notion of the arbitrariness of language and the "binaries" of synchronic and diachronic aspects of language and of the signifier and the signified. Furthermore, he negotiates the uncompleted claims and unresolved contradictions of Saussure's work by invoking the early German Romantic discourse on language. Gasparov's comparative reading offers a reciprocal illumination of the respective critical legacies of early German (Jena) Romanticism and Saussure's oeuvre. Beyond Pure Reason: Ferdinand de Saussure's Philosophy of Language and Its Early Romantic Antecedent should be of great interest to scholars of literary criticism and history, Romantic literary theory and literary modernity, structuralism/post-structuralism, and to "Saussurians" of all creeds. -- Azade Seyhan, Bryn Mawr College

Contents: AcknowledgmentsAbbreviationsIntroduction: Saussure, "Saussurism," and "Saussurology"11. The Person2. The Writings23. Antinomies of the Sign4. Fragmentation and Progressivity: Saussure's Semiotics in the Mirror of Early Romantic Epistemology5. Diachrony and History36. The Anagram7. Linguistics of Speech: An Unrealizable Promise?Conclusion: Freedom and Mystery -- the Peripathetic Nature of LanguageWorks CitedIndex 1/24/2012

Author Biography: Boris Gasparov is professor of Russian, co-chair and founder of the University Seminar on Romanticism, and a member of the Seminars on Linguistics and Slavic History and Culture at Columbia University. Educated in linguistics and musicology in Moscow in the 1960s, he completed his intellectual development in Tartu, Estonia, at the time a renowned center of research on cultural history, semiotics, and poetics. He immigrated to the United States in 1981 and taught at the University of California, Berkeley, for eleven years before settling at Columbia University. His publications range from books on Slavic medieval studies to the semiotics of everyday speech, Russian and European Romanticism and Modernism, and Russian music. They include Five Operas and a Symphony: Word and Music in Russian Culture, which received the ASCAP Deems Taylor Award, and Speech, Memory, and Meaning: Intertextuality in Everyday Language. He is also the editor of Cultural Mythologies of Russian Modernism: From the Golden Age to the Silver Age.