Algirdas Julien Greimas Research Articles

Um olhar semiótico sobre as várias maneiras de desenhar um cubo

Based upon semiotic studies of Algirdas Julien Greimas and on Plastic Semiotics developed by Jean-Marie Floch, which deals with pictures on a plane, we try to "read" children's drawing as a non-verbal language, built over a plane, plastically articulated to produce meaning.

Vloga stereotipov v sodobni slovenski kratki prozi

The theoretical framework for the role of an actor as a category in prosaic subjectivity was argued by Algirdas Julien Greimas with his actant model, foregrounding the required relation between subject and object. This may result in encountering the problem of stereotypes (Toril Moi) that still appear in modern literature, and are related mainly to the understanding of gender roles or the position of a woman and a man and their relationship within a society. The article focuses on the role of the female figure as a subject of modern Slovene short fiction, reflecting the various possibilities of verbalisation (e.g. the phenomenon of a stereotypical female figure as a seductress and its ironisation, the figure of a devoted wife or of an active woman).

A paixão e a passionalização em Saudosa Maloca

In this work we propose a paraphrase of Algirdas Julien Greimas “De la Nostalgie – Etude de Semantique Lexicale” based on the song “Saudosa Maloca” , composed by Adoniran Barbosa. We also talk about the compatibility between the melodic syntax and the passional organization of the song’s content.

Two approaches to the myth of city foundations: Syntagmatic and paradigmatic

The paper discusses the myth of the founding of Vilnius as an example of a myth of city foundation. The myth has received two independent semiotic interpretations. Narrative grammar procedures are applied to the analysis of the mythical story and the semantic code generating the story in the paper “Gediminas’ Dream (Lithuanian myth of city foundation: an attempt at analysis)” by Algirdas Julien Greimas (1971). The sovereignty ideology expressed in the myth, which describes religious and spiritual culture of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, is linked to the tri-functional model of the IndoEuropean social structure. The semantics of the Vilnius myth is seen as analogous with such Indo-European myths as king’s accession to the throne and creation of a city-state. The Lithuanian myth of Vilnius is linked paradigmatically to the Indo-European mythology in the study “Vilnius, Wilno, Vil’na: City and myth” by Vladimir Toporov (1980). At the level of the signifier, phonological equivalents of toponyms of Vilnius are traced. At the level of the signified, transformations of the “core” Indo-European myth are identified. The myth of the city foundation can be read both as a figurative form of cultural expression and as an ideology narrated as a plot of a story. In this view, the paradigmatic and syntagmatic approaches complement each other.

Critique and conviction: conversations with Francois Azouvi and Marc de Launay

Criticism and Conviction offers a rare opportunity to share personally in the intellectual life and journey of the eminent philosopher Paul Ricoeur. Internationally known for his influential works in hermeneutics, theology, psychoanalysis, and aesthetics, until now, Ricoeur has been conspicuously silent on the subject of himself. In this book-a conversation about his life and work with Fran ois Azouvi and Marc de Launay-Ricoeur reflects on a variety of philosophical, social, religious, and cultural topics, from the paradoxes of political power to the relationship between life and art, and life and death. In the first of eight conversations, Ricoeur traces the trajectory of his life, recounting the origins of his convictions and the development of his intellect against the tragic events of the twentieth century. Declaring himself the son of a victim of the First World War, Ricoeur, an orphan, sketches his early years in the house of stern but loving grandparents, and the molding of his intellect under the tutelage of Roland Dalbiez, Gabriel Marcel, and Andr Philip. Ricoeur tells the intriguing story of his capture and five-year imprisonment by the Germans during World War II, where he and his compatriots fashioned an intellectual life complete with a library and lectures, and where he, amazingly, was able to continue his dissertation research. Elegantly interweaving anecdotal with philosophical meditations, Ricoeur recounts his relationships with some of the twentieth century's greatest figures, such as Heidegger, Jaspers, and Eliade. He also shares his views on French philosophers and explains his tumultuous relationship with Jacques Lacan. And while expressing his deepest respect for the works of Claude L vi-Strauss and Michel Foucault, Ricoeur reserves his greatest admiration for the narratologist Algirdas Julien Greimas. Ricoeur also explores the relationship between the philosophical and religious domains, attempting to reconcile the two poles in his thought. And readers who have struggled with Ricoeur's work will be grateful for these illuminating discussions that provide an invaluable key to his writings on language and narrative, especially those on metaphor and time. Spontaneous and lively, Criticism and Conviction is a passionate confirmation of Ricoeur's eloquence, lucidity, and intellectual rigor, and affirms his position as one of this century's greatest thinkers. It is an essential book for anyone interested in philosophy and literary criticism.

Structuralism's Fortunate Fall

Structuralism’s Fortunate Fall David Herman François Dosse, History of Structuralism, Vols. I (The Rising Sign, 1945–1966) and II (The Sign Sets, 1967-Present). Translated by Deborah Glassman. Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1997. Believe it or not, this two-volume, 975-page history of French structuralism, originally published in French in 1991–1992 and based on interviews with some 123 French academics and intellectuals, reads like a good novel. Once you pick it up, it is hard to put Dosse’s History down. From the beginning, structuralism makes for an ideal protagonist, fighting against impossible odds and winning our sympathies throughout all its difficulties and vicissitudes. Indeed, in Dosse’s account the early structuralists come across as heroic revolutionaries, underdogs opposed by powerful reactionary forces visibly operative at the Sorbonne, but deeply entrenched in French academe at large (I: 191–201). In these postpoststructuralist times, it is easy to forget that the structuralists were in fact the Young Turks of their day. They were articulate champions of avant-garde literature and art (II: 154–55, 200–206), formidable analysts of specifically sociopolitical structures (I: 142–57, 309–15; II: 247–59), tireless promoters of intellectual revitalization, ingenious methodological innovators (I: 202–22), and fearless breakers-down of accepted disciplinary boundaries. At the same time, Dosse engrossingly emplots the structuralist adventure in France as a particular kind of rise and fall: after revolutionizing philosophy, psychoanalysis, literary theory and the social sciences, structuralism died a spectacular death, and no disciplinary tradition will ever be the same. This overarching plot allows the author to attach localized episodes to his ongoing historical narrative. Thus, whereas the structuralist dissolution of the subject proved untenable and was ultimately abandoned, it forced a rethinking of the kind of subjectivity that underwrote prestructuralist humanism (II: 324–63). The same goes for the banishment of history from the domain of structuralist analysis (I: 181–83; II: 364–375, 427–36); history is back, but it is not the same as it used to be. What is more, Dosse’s character vignettes make such reversals (or perhaps zigzags) of fortune come palpably alive. The two volumes are studded with portraits of major and minor figures who lived the structuralist revolution and its aftermath—from Roman Jakobson, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Georges Dumézil, Algirdas Julien Greimas, Roland Barthes, Gérard Genette, Oswald Ducrot, Julia Kristeva, Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser, Jacques Lacan, Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Derrida, to Gaston Berger, Jean-Marie Auzias, Louis Hay, Joseph Sumpf and Jean-Marie Benoist, among many others. Here emerges a second assumption at the basis of Dosse’s account: that the history of structuralist thought reduces, at one level of analysis, to a collocation of the biographies of its proponents, fellow-travellers, and detractors. This is therefore a history that takes shape through an encyclopedic assemblage of highly memorable images: Lévi-Strauss being dazzled in the early 1940s by Roman Jakobson’s classes on sound and meaning at the New School for Social Research, while both men were in exile from Europe (I: 12, 21–24); Barthes finding his way to Greimas in Alexandria, Egypt, in 1949 and undergoing his fateful semiological conversion, like a Saint Paul converted on the way to Damascus (I: 68, 74); Lacan implementing his principle of “scansion,” or pointed break, by cutting short his sessions and thus multiplying the number of patients he could see and charge (I: 95–97); Foucault brilliantly defending his thesis on the history of madness in 1961, amazing a thesis committee that included Georges Canguilhem and Jean Hyppolite (I: 150); André Martinet lecturing to classes of six hundred students during the height of linguistics’ popularity as a “pilot science” for structuralist theorizing (I: 192); Nicolas Ruwet reading a text on generative grammar on the train from Liège to Paris and embracing the Chomskyean model by the time he arrived (II: 4); Derrida opposing Lacan’s candidacy to become head of the department of psychoanalysis being founded in the late 1960s at the then-experimental university at Vincennes (II: 148); Tzvetan Todorov being profoundly transformed, shifting from formalist to more broadly socioideological concerns, as a result of his 1981...

Toward Defining Aesthetic Perception: Semiotics and Utopian Reflection

De l'imperfection (On Imperfection), the latest book by Algirdas Julien Greimas, comes as a surprise. No one who has followed the development of his epistemological discourse would have foreseen the next step in his semiotic system to be a work such as On Imperfection. This short but very dense book opens a completely new field within Greimas's semiotic investigations. Neither his semiotics of narrativity nor his semiotics of modalities intimated the theme and method, the aesthetic and ethical considerations, raised by the analyses which this new work offers. At the heart of its critical project lies the problem of aesthetic perception (saisie esthitique), or aesthesis, whose parameters and variants are systematically and progressively explored through five studies focusing on certain modern narrative texts and a single poetic example, Rilke's 'Jbung am Klavier. Greimas has not written an aesthetic treatise. Rather, he seeks to describe various configurations of the subject-object relationship in which specific aesthetic perceptions arise. The form of the subjectobject relationship may vary, but the reciprocal transformation of subject by object and object by subject remains the common event in aesthesis. A dialectical process of transformation constitutes the pathemic invariant of aesthesis.2 What Greimas tries to capture are the precise stages and forms of the transformation which subject and object undergo. One cannot say that the question of aesthetic judgment is the dominant theme of the analyses in On Imperfection. The work is not a discourse about a discourse, nor does Greimas seek to define beauty; beauty is implicitly understood as that which pleases the subject. The Kantian parameters universally and without concept have been omitted. Kant's philosophical aesthetics is not