Saussure For Beginners

$15.95

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Imprint: For Beginners
Availability: In stock

Book Details

Pages

128 Pages

Size

6 x 9

Format

Trade Paperback

Pub. Date

07/14/2015

ISBN

978-1-939994-41-7

Publisher

For Beginners

Authors

  • Illustrated by Abbe Lubell

  • Author W. Terrence Gordon

    W. Terrence Gordon has published more than twenty books, including Linguistics for Beginners, McLuhan for Beginners, and Marshall McLuhan: Escape into Understanding. He has been the editor of the Marshall McLuhan Publishing Program at Gingko Press for the past twelve years, and is currently a professor emeritus at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Lynsey Hutchinson is a freelance illustrator and musician from Edinburgh, Scotland. Her work was first published in the award-winning graphic novel Burke & Hare, and she is one of the creators behind the Southern Gothic anthology Bayou Arcana: Songs of Loss and Redemption. Both Lynsey and her artwork appeared in the BAFTA-nominated 2011 independent Scottish film Electric Man.

A concise, accessible introduction to the great linguist who shaped the study of language for the 20th century, Saussure for Beginners puts the challenging ideas of Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913) into clear and illuminating terms, focusing on the unifying principles of his teachings and showing how his thoughts on linguistics migrated to anthropology.

Ferdinand de Saussure’s work is so powerful that it not only redefined modern linguistics, it also opened our minds to new ways of approaching anthropology, literary criticism, and psychoanalysis. Saussure felt that 19th century linguistics avoided hard questions about what language is and how it works. By 1911, he had taught a general linguistics course only three times. Upon his death, however, his students were so inspired by his teachings that they published them as the “Course in General Linguistics.”

Saussure For Beginners takes you through this course, points out the unifying principles, and shows how these ideas migrated from linguistics to other subjects.

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