ferdinand de saussure general linguistics

Based on the lectures that Saussure gave at the end of his life at the University of Geneva, the text of the Course was collated from notes taken by Saussure's students and published by Charles Bally, Albert Sechehaye, and Albert Riedlinger.

The founder of modern linguistics, Saussure inaugurated semiology, structuralism, and deconstruction and made possible the work of Jacques Lacan, French feminism, cultural studies, New Historicism, and postcolonialism. It also restores Wade Baskin's delightful original English translation (1959), which has long been unavailable. New endnotes enlarge Saussure’s contexts to include literary criticism, cultural studies, and philosophy.This new edition of Ferdinand de Saussure's Course in General Linguistics (1916) is the first critical edition of Saussure to appear in English. An introduction situates Saussure within the history of ideas and describes the history of scholarship that made Course in General Linguistics legendary.

Baskin renders Saussure clearly and accessibly, allowing readers to experience his shift of the theory of reference from mimesis to performance and his expansion of poetics to include all media, including the life sciences and environmentalism. This is the first critical edition of Course in General Linguistics to appear in English and restores Wade Baskin’s original translation of 1959, in which the terms “signifier” and “signified” are introduced into English in this precise way. Most important, Saussure presents the principles of a new linguistic science that includes the invention of semiology, or the theory of the “signifier,” the “signified,” and the “sign” that they combine to produce. Based on Saussure’s lectures, Course in General Linguistics (1916) traces the rise and fall of the historical linguistics in which Saussure was trained, the synchronic or structural linguistics with which he replaced it, and the new look of diachronic linguistics that followed this change. The founder of modern linguistics, Ferdinand de Saussure inaugurated semiology, structuralism, and deconstruction and made possible the work of Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Lacan, thus enabling the development of French feminism, gender studies, New Historicism, and postcolonialism.

Ferdinand de saussure general linguistics