Work · Structuralism & Poststructuralism
Course in General Linguistics
Compiled after his death by Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye from students’ notes of his Geneva lectures (1907–11): the linguistic sign is arbitrary; language is a system of differences.
Introduction
Saussure never wrote this book. After his death in 1913, his colleagues Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye, who had not attended the lectures themselves, compiled it from students’ notes of his three courses in general linguistics (1907–1911), assisted by the student Albert Riedlinger, and published it in 1916. Its central distinctions are those between langue and parole, between the synchronic study of a language at one moment and its diachronic history, and between signifier and signified. Saussure compares language to a game of chess, in which each piece counts only through its position in the system. Later editions of the notes, and manuscripts found in 1996, have shown how much the editors shaped the text.
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Connections
Taken up in
- Mythologies1957 · Roland Barthes
- Wild Thought (La Pensée sauvage)1962 · Claude Lévi-Strauss
- Écrits1966 · Jacques Lacan
- Structural Semantics1966 · Algirdas Julien Greimas
- The Structure of the Artistic Text1970 · Yuri Lotman
Criticized in
- Of Grammatology1967 · Jacques Derrida
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