History of Structuralism: Volume 1: The Rising Sign, 1945-1966

by Francois Dosse

Overview

The first comprehensive history of one of the most influential intellectual movements of the twentieth century.

Structuralism has had a profound impact on disciplines ranging from literary theory to sociology, from anthropology to philosophy, from history to psychoanalysis. François Dosse tells the story of structuralism from its beginnings in postwar Paris to its culmination as a movement that would reconfigure French intellectual life and reverberate throughout the Western world. This first volume of his study, The Rising Sign, 1945-1966, cogently maps the dizzying array of personalities and ideas of the early structuralist movement, paving the way for later developments.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780816622412
Publisher:	University of Minnesota Press
Publication date:	10/15/1998
Series:	Contradictions of Modernity , #8
Edition description:	First edition
Pages:	488
Product dimensions:	5.88(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.40(d)

About the Author

Deborah Glassman is director of the Paris Center for Critical Studies and is the author of Marguerite Duras: Fascinating Vision and Narrative Cure.

Editorial Reviews

This is a comprehensive history of what Dosse frames as the unprecedented rise and fall of an intellectual movement that transformed the way we consider human society.

Choice

In the first volume of this work, Doss (director, Paris Center for Critical Studies) chronicles with superb documentation the development of the structuralist movement as it was propelled by such forces as Claude Lvi-Strauss (in anthropology), Jacque Lacan (in psychoanalysis), Michel Foucault (in literature and history), and many other French social scientists and humanists. Structuralism emerged as a reaction against the French university system's rigidity and refusal to accept, as philologist Leo Spitzer observed, Anglo-Saxon New Criticism and other didactic methodologies. Then it spread to other countries, for example, American universities' foreign language departments in the late Sixties. Doss's unnecessarily tedious, long second volume, The Sign Sets, 1967-Present, succeeds only insofar as it demonstrates how structuralism during the Eighties was relegated to its proper place in the university curriculum as just another alternative methodology. Glassman's adept translation will prove useful to social science scholars and humanists.Robert T. Ivey, Univ. of Memphis, Tenn.

Library Journal