This course will investigate the major concepts, debates, and paradigms of thought generally grouped under the term Structuralism, beginning with the Course in General Linguistics published under the name of Ferdinand de Saussure (1916) and extending through Camille Robcis’ Law of Kinship (2013). We will explore the asymmetrical relations and epistemological underpinnings of high-stakes binaries such as synchrony/diachrony, formalism/historicism, phonetics/phonology, and linguistics/poetics, tracing the contours that cleave the science of language to and from the language arts. 

Readings will include essays by Roman Jakobson, Émile Benveniste, Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva, Gérard Genette, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Jean-Claude Milner; theoretical texts will be set in provocative juxtaposition with literary works by (at least) Stéphane Mallarmé, Charles Baudelaire, Edgar Allan Poe, Gertrude Stein, and Velimir Khlebnikov