Roman Jakobson: Six Lectures on Sound and Meaning (1976/1978)

As Lévi-Strauss writes: “These innovatory ideas, towards which I was no doubt drawn by my own thought but as yet with neither the boldness nor the conceptual tools necessary to organize them properly, were all the more convincing in that Jakobson’s exposition of them was performed with that incomparable art which made him the most dazzling teacher and lecturer that I had ever been lucky enough to hear.”

This book is marked by Jakobson’s elegance and demonstrative powers. Jakobson never pursues abstract and sometimes difficult course of his argument without illuminating it by examples from a great variety of languages and from the arts.

Originally published as Six leçons sur le son et le sens by Les Editions de Minuit, Paris, 1976.
Translated by John Mepham
Preface by Claude-Lévi Strauss
Publisher The MIT Press, 1978
ISBN 0262100193
116 pages

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