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    10 views8 pages

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    Diptesh Saha

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    38 Formalism and structuralism 11 1971-2, the French literary theorist Roland Barthes (1915-80) held a year-long seminar devoted tothe history of semiology, the “general science of signs” that had been conceived asan extension ‘oflinguisticsby the Swiss Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913) inbis, Course in General Linguistics (posthumously published in 1916) ‘nd simultaneously, under the name of semiotic, by the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) in his Collected Papers also posthumously published, from 1931 to 1958). Barthes had been one of the leading voices of structuralism from the mid-fifties to the late sixties, together with the anthropologist ‘Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908-2009), the philosopher Michel Foucault (1926-84), and the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, and as such had greatly contributed to the resurrection of the semiological project, ‘which he had clearly laid out in Elements of Semtiology (1964) and “Structural Analysis of Narratives” (1966). But he had seriously ‘undermined that very project in his most recent books, /Z, The Empire of Signs both 1970), and Sade, Fourie, Loyola (971). ‘The curiosity of Barthes’s auditors (myself among them) was immense: in this period of intellectual turmoil marked by a general Oedipal desire to kill the structuralist model, they expected hhim to ease their understanding of the shift underway from ‘44 (structuralism) to B (poststructuralism)—a term that neatly describes Barthes’s work at the time, but which was never con-

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