Ferdinand de Saussure

Culler explicates how Saussure's Cours in General Linguistics came to be. He also places the concepts of Structuralism and Semiotics in easy to understand words.This is a fabulous text for anyone who is new to Literary Theory. I read this during a required course for my English BA - Contemporary Critical Theory. Being completely new to the idea of structuralism and semiotics, Culler's explanation put it in a light that not only blew my mind but was easy to understand. It does not take much reading of Culler to understand exactly why Saussure's Cours in General Linguistics is such a game changer for how we perceive literature today!

I am not sure I have a whole lot to add to the previous reviews of this book. Ferdinand de Saussure was an early twentieth-century linguist who had a profound effect on twentieth-century philosophy. I assume he also had a fairly large impact on linguistics as well, but I am not a linguist, and I am less familiar with the field of linguistics than I am with the field of philosophy. Ferdinand de Saussure was essentially responsible for the birth of structuralism which was a revolution in thought that had effects that cut across disciplinary boundaries, effecting anthropology (Claude Levi-Strauss), psychology (Jacques Lacan), and philosophy (Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, etc.).It is simply impossible to have any understanding of twentieth-century Continental philosophy, particularly French philosophy, without some understanding of Saussure, and as the title of my review suggests, it would be hard to imagine a better introduction to Saussure's thought than the one provided by Jonathan Culler in this work. Culler's writing is extremely clear and lucid. You do not need to have any prior knowledge of linguistics, Saussure, or structuralism, in order to read, or get value from reading this book. This book is especially recommended for philosopher's interested in Saussure's work, since Culler spends the last two chapters of the book situating Saussure's theories within the intellectual culture, and trends, of his time, by situating his theories in relation to Freud, Durkheim, and giving a very brief explanation of Derrida's critique of logocentrism. The book is relatively short but full of substance. If you are interested in modern French philosophy, and you want to get a quick, but substantive introduction, to the linguistic theories that lie in the background of so much modern French philosophy, I highly recommend getting your hands on a copy of Jonathan Culler's book. You will not regret it.

Ferdinand de Saussure, an outstanding linguist of the late 19th century, lectured on general linguistics at the University of Geneva intermittently from 1907 to 1911. The _Cours de Linguistique Generale_ was not actually written by him, but compiled and edited by Bally and Sechehaye, who had not themselves attended his lectures, from lecture notes written by those who had been his students. As Culler remarks (p. 25), "Most teachers would shudder at the thought of having their views handed on in this way," and the fact that Saussure did not himself choose to publish a work on the nature of linguistics is significant. However, on the basis largely of the _Cours_, Saussure is often cited as the founder of modern structural linguistics.Unfortunately for the 20th century, the _Cours_ is also the ultimate source of ideas which eventually settled into studies other than linguistics, such as sociology and anthropology, and most notably and most inevitably, literary theory and even philosophy. This in spite of the fact that Saussure's model of language did not survive, for very good reasons, in linguistics itself after the middle of the century, and has undergone, again within linguistics itself, severe criticism, of which perhaps the best summing-up is to be found in Roy Harris's _Reading Saussure_ (Open Court, 1987). Thus we have Jacques Derrida's deconstructionism, founded on a deeply flawed manner of dealing with human languages, at the very root of what is now widely known as the "post-modern" era. I recommend Harris's book highly to anyone with some linguistics background who is at all curious about the actual origins of so much fashionable contemporary thought.Meanwhile, linguistics itself has been almost untouched by deconstruction and post-modernism. The term "linguistics," which frequently appears in the writings of such as Derrida, Barthes, Baudrillard and the rest of "the French intellectuals" and their many followers in academia seems to refer to Saussure of the _Cours_, rather than to the last century of actual linguistic work.Unlike that of Harris, Culler's book can be approached rather easily by the general reader. It falls essentially into two halves, the first dealing with the ideas of the _Cours_ and the second with their impact on disciplines other than linguistics, the latter being handled mainly by describing the development of semiotics, the general study of sign systems. Culler is entirely uncritical of Saussure's ideas and merely attempts to describe them in a general way; if he sees the problems he does not say so. One of the most significant errors of the _Cours_, for example, is the notion that language creates concepts (rather than presupposing them). This Culler transmits without the slightest sign of awareness of its profound implications (such as that human beings with no full-fledged sign system-the congenitally deaf and those deafened in early life who due to isolation or other factors do not acquire a system of manual signing-have no concepts).In fairness to Culler I confess I have not looked at his 1983 work, _On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism After Structuralism_ (Cornell University Press), which actually followed the first edition of _Ferdinand de Saussure_, mainly because my main interest is linguistics rather than literary theory.I can recommend _Ferdidand de Saussure_ as very readable; but I must point out that Saussure has long since gone the way of a number of other still derivatively influential 19th-century thinkers.Ken Miner