The Writing of Spirit: Soul, System, and the Roots of Language Science

By:

Sign Up Now! Already a Member? Log In
You must be logged into Bookshare to access this title. Learn about membership options, or view our freely available titles.

Synopsis
Contemporary thought has been profoundly shaped by the turn toward synchronic models of explanation, which analyze phenomena as they appear at a single moment, rather than diachronically as they develop through time. Nowhere, however, has this transformation unfolded more influentially than in the domain of language science, where the terminology of synchrony and diachrony first explicitly emerges. The Writing of Spirit sets out to demonstrate, through a new history of language science, that we do not know what we think we know about this pivotal juncture in our intellectual past. Twentieth-century linguistic structuralism, it argues, does not replace the historicist approach of the nineteenth century with a more modern, more systematic perspective, as has long been assumed, because the relationship between history and system is structuralism’s point. The real revolution consists not in a turn away from language time, but in a turn toward time’s absolutely minimal conditions, and thus also toward a theory of diachrony, boiled down and distilled. Pourciau arrives at this surprising and powerful conclusion through an analysis of language scientific theories over the course of two centuries, associated with thinkers from Jacob Grimm to the Russian Futurists and from Richard Wagner to Roman Jakobson, in domains as disparate as historical linguistics, phonology, acoustics, opera theory, philosophy, poetics, and psychology. The result is a novel contribution to one of the most pressing questions of our intellectual moment, namely, the question of what role the study of history should play in the interpretation of the present.
Copyright:
2017

Book Details

Book Quality:
Publisher Quality
ISBN-13:
9780823275649
Related ISBNs:
9780823275625, 9780823275632
Publisher:
Fordham University Press
Date of Addition:
Copyrighted By:
Fordham University Press
Adult content:
No
Language:
English
Has Image Descriptions:
No
Categories:
Nonfiction, Science, Literature and Fiction, Language Arts, Philosophy
Submitted By:
Bookshare Staff
Usage Restrictions:
This is a copyrighted book.

Reviews

No Rating Yet