Tripped up by “structuralism”
In what is likely to be another blow to my classroom ethos, I need to correct an error I introduced into the discussion in 5531 Composition Pedagogy last Wednesday. A classmate asked about what “structuralism” is. I confidently described it as arising from the linguistics of the Frenchman Ferdinand de Saussure, embodied famously in the work of the Prague School (a movement, not an institution) of linguistic theory, a leading figure of which was Roman Jacobson. So far, so good. But then I characterized it roughly as the notion that we can understand a subject (like language or culture) by Read More …