Roman Jakobson--Selected Writings I: Phonological Studies

Mouton, 1962. Hardcover. Very Good. 0x0x0. [From the library of noted scholar Richard A. Macksey.] Hardcover and dust jacket. Tears to jacket with loss. Dust jacket in protective mylar cover. Good binding and cover. Shelf wear. Contemporary signature of Macksey on front end page, else unmarked. x, 678 p., 25 cm. Text is in several languages. <br> Roman Jakobson was a literary theorist and critic, greatly influenced by Ferdinand de Saussure, the founder of structuralism and of semiology, the connection between signs as signifiers and the signified concepts. Before Saussure, linguistics was the historical ("diachronic") study of language, primarily grammars, over time. Structuralism looks to the "synchronic" study of structure alone to discover the functions of language. Jakobson extended linguistics beyond syntax, semantics, and morphology, with a careful analysis of the sounds of language, which often convey a great deal of meaning beyond the text. He extended his new critical tools beyond his new phonology to syntax and morphology, and even semantics. He studied communications theory (Claude Shannon), cybernetics (Norbert Wiener), and the semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce, using them all to study poetry, music, and films (especially the emergence of sound in films). Jakobson's influential essay on linguistics and poetics distinguished six communication functions, each associated with a dimension or factor of the communication process. With two diagrams similar to Claude Shannon's sender-message-receiver diagram in the theory of the communication of information, Jakobson presented his theory of the poetic function of language: Language must be investigated in all the variety of its functions. Before discussing the poetic function we must define its place among the other functions of language. An outline of these functions demands a concise survey of the constitutive factors in any speech event, in any act of verbal communication. <br> "Richard A. Macksey was a celebrated Johns Hopkins University professor whose affiliation with the university spanned six and a half decades. A legendary figure not only in his own fields of critical theory, comparative literature, and film studies but across all the humanities, Macksey possessed enormous intellectual capacity and a deeply insightful human nature. He was a man who read and wrote in six languages, was instrumental in launching a new era in structuralist thought in America, maintained a personal library containing a staggering collection of books and manuscripts, inspired generations of students to follow him to the thorniest heights of the human intellect, and penned or edited dozens of volumes of scholarly works, fiction, poetry, and translation." - Johns Hopkins University