Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma

Review
Author(s): Ewa M. Thompson
Review by: Ewa M. Thompson
Source: Books Abroad, Vol. 47, No. 2 (Spring, 1973), p. 423
Published by: Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40127297
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WORLD LITERATURE 423

still waiting for a work which would make

Frederic Jameson. The Prison-House of Language. A Critical Account of Structuralism

some of the structuralist insights available for

Princeton University Press. 1972. xiii -f- 230

pages. $9.

cism.

and Russian Formalism. Princeton, N.J.

the average student of literature, the way

Understanding Poetry did it for New CritiEwa M. Thompson
Rice University

It all began, Jameson tells us, with de

Saussure and his distinction between the

synchronic and diachronic vision of language.

In the last hundred years one observes a shift
from the diachronic (historical) way of looking at language to the synchronic one, i.e.,
envisioning the presently existing language as
a multi-levelled system of transformations.
The historical vision entails substantialist
thinking: language elements are seen as substances which change in the course of years.

The synchronic view of language involves

rather an awareness of relations: it is via the

structure of relations that the language "particles" are defined. In fact, Jameson insists,
what we used to think about as the substance
of a language, consists of the sum-total of the
relations between the signs of that language.
Jameson sees two major projections of these
linguistic postulates: one, formalist (where the
result was a circular definition of a work of
art as the sum-total of its devices) and the
other, structuralist (where the investigations

center around three elements of the sign

structure: the signifier, the signified and sig-

nification itself). He stresses the primacy of

the signifier over the signified: fittingly, he
devotes most attention to those structuralists

who tend to focus on the signifier (LeviStrauss, Lacan, Greimas, Todorov and

Barthes).
The scope and abstractness of the problems
broached in this book defy an easy summary.
This points both to the merits and the shortcomings of Jameson's work. He has dealt with
a wide variety of French structuralists - those

oriented toward anthropology, economics,

philosophy, history and literature - in a com-

petent, sometimes brilliant way. To my

knowledge no American critic has yet undertaken so ambitious an enterprise. However,

the book, though basically expository, is no
primer in structuralism: much of the exposition is abbreviated to the point where it ceases
to inform a reader innocent of the previous
knowledge of the subject and does not yet
begin to offer original theorizing that would
attract an audience for a considerable period
of time. Thus the circle of its readers will be
limited, I think, to those wishing to rehearse
their already present knowledge of French
structuralism and Russian formalism. We are

Marianne Resting. Auf der Suche nach der

Realitdt. Kritische Schriften zur modernen

Literatur. Munich. Piper. 1972. 292 pages.

19.80 DM.

Ever since Walter Benjamin's essay "Das

Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit," the awareness of
the relationship between modern art and the
conglomerate of natural science, technology
and economics has reached beyond the confines of orthodox Marxist criticism. Specifical-

ly, the appearance of industrialized and commercialized pop art during the sixties gave
rise to considerations about modern art which

tried to avoid both the incapacity of traditional

Marxist criticism to deal with formal aspects

of modern esthetics, as well as the pitfalls of
the esoteric, "intrinsic" interpretation of the

new critics.

Kesting's latest book is a case in point. The

essays and reviews of modern literature collected in this volume were written for newspapers or radio between 1965 and 1971. Nevertheless, the book is surprisingly coherent in
argument and outlook. Marianne Kesting not
only provides the reader with perceptive insights into the crosscurrents of the international literary scene and with informative,
though short, interpretations of individual
works, but her essays also reflect on some of
the key issues debated in literary circles in the

late sixties, i.e., the death of literature, the

democratization and popularization of art, the
preference of action over writing and the

value of esthetic rebellion.

Kesting examines the roots of modern esthetics in the works of Baudelaire, Flaubert
and Mallarme which mirror the definite split
between bourgeois and poetic existence still
dominant today. In all her observations, be it
on early twentieth-century authors, on the
latest French new novels or on the experimental prose of young German authors, Resting attempts to relate the esthetic answers and
solutions, found by different authors in their
search for reality, to the background of mod-

ern industrial society. She interprets along

socio-economic lines while adhering to a strict-

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