Abstract
Lacan, Barthes and Derrida in the 1950s and 1960s had produced important readings of the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure’s concept of the sign. This concept, according to which the phonic or graphic material of a word (the signifier) is bound to what the word signifies (the signified) in a complex chain of differences in which both are defined and meaning is produced, has been fundamental to the development of modern linguistics and the semiology which takes its inspiration from that linguistics. If the French theorists had read Saussure carefully if idiosyncratically, a commonplace version of their readings swiftly became unquestioned truth in much literary and cultural criticism.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
On this theme, see Roland Barthes’s discussion of isologous systems in Elements of Semiology, trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith (London: Jonathan Cape, 1967), pp. 43–4.
Comparatively clear accounts of post-Saussurean opposition to the Theory are to be found in: Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983);
Catherine Belsey, Critical Practice (London: Methuen, 1980);
and Terence Hawkes, Structuralism and Semiotics (London: Methuen, 1977).
Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: the Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), p. 158.
J. L. Austin and P. F. Strawson, ‘Truth’, Proc. Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume (1950) pp. 111ff.
A term borrowed from P. F. Strawson, Individuals (London: Methuen, 1959), p. 18.
Norman Geschwind, The Development of the Brain and the Evolution of Language’, in Monograph Series on Language and Linguistics, Georgetown University, Washington DC, vol. 17 (1964) pp. 155–69.
P. F. Strawson, Editor’s Introduction to Philosophical Logic (Oxford University Press, 1967 ), p. 15.
We could define a statement as D. W. Hamlyn does, as ‘a form of language that is true or false’. The Theory of Knowledge (London: Macmillan - now Palgrave Macmillan, 1970).
For a more detailed treatment of these points, see R. C. Tallis, ‘As If There Could Be Such Things As True Stories’, Cambridge Quarterly, xv (1986) no. 2, pp. 95–107.
F. P. Ramsay, The Foundation of Mathematics (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1931), pp. 142–3.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2004 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Heath, S., MacCabe, C., Riley, D. (2004). Raymond Tallis, Not Saussure: A Critique of Post-Saussurean Literary Theory (1988). In: Heath, S., MacCabe, C., Riley, D. (eds) The Language, Discourse, Society Reader. Language, Discourse, Society. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230213340_11
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230213340_11
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-0-333-76372-8
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-21334-0
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature & Performing Arts CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)