The ‘Brazilian Connection’ in the History of American Linguistics

1999 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
pp. 355-382
Author(s):  
Cristina Altman
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
The United States ◽  
South American ◽  
Columbia University ◽  
Structural Linguistics ◽  
History Of ◽  
Roman Jakobson ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The One

Summary When mention is made of Brazil in connection with American linguistics, it usually amounts to a reference to the Linguistic Circle of New York, where Roman Jakobson (1896–1982) and Claude Lévi-Strauss (b.1908), who had come from Brazil where he had done ethnological work, met and exchanged ideas. This singular event has cast a shadow on other contacts between Brazil and American linguistics, of which, the one between Jakobson and the Brazilian linguist Joaquim Mattoso Câmara (1904–1970) was much more consequential, at least as far as the implementation of structural linguistics in Brazil and in South America generally during the 1950s and the 1960s is concerned. Mattoso Câmara came to the United States and spent most of his time in New York City (September 1943 till April 1944), where he got exposure to Praguean type structuralism, notably through Jakobson’s lectures he attended at Columbia University and at the École Libre of New York, which had been established by European refugees at the time. He also participated in the first meetings of the Linguistic Circle of New York in 1943 as one of its co-founders. Following his return to Rio de Janeiro, Mattoso Câmara proposed, in 1949, as his doctoral thesis a phonemic description of Brazilian Portuguese. The work was published a few years later, in 1953. His most influential work, Princípios de Lingüística Gerai, first published in 1954, had two more revised and updated editions (1958, 1967) and served to introduce several generations of Brazilian as well as other South American students to structural linguistics during the 1950s and 1960s.

scholarly journals Roman Jakobson

Linguistics ◽  
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaret Thomas
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Literary History ◽  
The United States ◽  
Special Focus ◽  
Columbia University ◽  
Distinctive Features ◽  
Language And Literature ◽  
Roman Jakobson ◽  
The 1960S

Roman Osipovich Jakobson (1896–1982) famously characterized himself as a “Russian philologist. Period.” He arranged for his gravestone to be engraved simply with the words “Roman Jakobson—RUSSKIJ FILOLOG.” Jakobson’s Russianness, and his love of language and literature, are beyond dispute. However, his intellectual contributions far exceed the intersection of the two terms of his self-description. Jakobson was a dynamic and protean scholar, who wrote about Poetics, Phonology, historical linguistics (especially Slavic), morphosyntax, semiotics, psycholinguistics, and cultural and literary history. He participated avidly in a succession of scholarly collaboratives which generated ideas about language and literature that radiated outward to other thinkers and disciplines. In a first and formative instance, Jakobson was a precocious member of the avant garde literary-artistic Futurist movement in Moscow in the 1910s. In 1926, he co-founded the Prague Linguistic Circle, which developed a distinctive response to the structuralist linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure (b. 1857–d. 1913) that was then spreading across Europe. Following his immigration to America in 1941, Jakobson co-founded the Linguistic Circle of New York and taught at the French-Belgian university in exile, the École Libre des Hautes Études, before joining the faculty of Columbia University (in 1946), Harvard (in 1949), and MIT (in 1957, concurrent with his appointment at Harvard). Working steadily into his eighties through these successive dislocations, Jakobson produced a flood of texts and lectures addressed to diverse audiences, often coauthored with colleagues or former students. Much of his attention went to close linguistic analysis of literature, with a special focus on the formal linguistic features and sound patterns of poetry. A second theme was his work in phonology, especially in his collaboration with fellow Russian émigré and Prague Circle member Nikolai Trubetzkoy (b. 1890–d. 1938). Jakobson resolved phonemes into bundles of hierarchically organized distinctive features, emphasizing acoustic over articulatory definitions, in which one member has default or “unmarked” status relative to the other. The notion of distinctive features influenced generative phonology and other approaches in the 1960s, although Jakobson’s contributions are not always acknowledged. Another of Jakobson’s most significant accomplishments was his role in transmitting structuralism from Europe to the United States, especially during his residence in New York when his lectures on Saussure at the École Libre influenced anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss (b. 1908–d. 2009). Through Jakobson, structuralist ideas passed to Lévi-Strauss, and then to sociology, philosophy, literary criticism, and 20th-century humanities in general, before meeting opposition from poststructuralism in the late 1960s.

Introduction

Stirrings ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 1-25
Author(s):  
Lana Dee Povitz
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Nonprofit Organizations ◽  
Low Cost ◽  
New Left ◽  
The United States ◽  
Community Control ◽  
Female Leaders ◽  
Food Activism ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1960S

Using the conceptual lens of terroir, this chapter provides an overview of hunger and poverty in the United States, starting with the urban liberalism of the 1960s and tracing the onset of austerity politics from mid-1970s through the early 2000s. It shows how New York City food activism was connected to an array of apparently unrelated social movements, including American Communism, community control, the countercultural New Left, feminism, Black Power, and AIDS activism. As governments reduced spending on social programs, leaders from these movements formed nonprofit organizations geared toward providing services, such as emergency meals and low-cost groceries. This chapter offers an overview of why and how service provision came to absorb the attention of late-twentieth century activists and shows how nonprofit kitchens and offices became sites of mentorship. As charismatic, overwhelmingly female leaders passed on values and strategies forged in earlier eras, they enacted activist genealogies that helped sustain political involvement over decades. Powerful interpersonal bonds and people’s own sense of being transformed by their activism illuminate the underappreciated role of emotion in the history of left-progressive movements.

The Cul-de-Sac of Social Democracy

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan M. Wald
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Social Democracy ◽  
Left Wing ◽  
Social Democratic ◽  
New York Intellectuals ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Irving Howe ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
The 1960S

A history of Irving Howe and Dissent magazine is used to examine the strengths and weaknesses of the social democratic alternative that became the Left wing of the New York intellectuals during the 1950s. This is followed by an examination of the life and work of Harvey Swados, which also express the ambiguities that would render this tradition problematic during the era of new radicalization in the 1960s.

Queer Legal History: A Field Grows Up and Comes Out

2011 ◽  
Vol 36 (02) ◽  
pp. 537-559 ◽  
Author(s):  
Felicia Kornbluh
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Legal History ◽  
The United States ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Military Law ◽  
The One ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The New Deal

This essay examines recent scholarship on the legal history of sexuality in the United States. It focuses on Margot Canaday's The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Modern America (2009) and Marc Stein's Sexual Injustice: Supreme Court Decisions from Griswold to Roe (2010). It also reviews recent work on the history of marriage, including Sarah Barringer Gordon's The Spirit of the Law: Religious Voices and the Constitution in Modern America (2010) and George Chauncey's Why Marriage? The History Shaping Today's Debate Over Gay Equality (2004), and the history of military law Defending America: Military Culture and the Cold‐War Court Martial (2005), by Elizabeth Lutes Hillman. The essay argues that this scholarship is significant because it offers a different view of sex and power than the one derived from the early writing of Michel Foucault. “Queer legal history” treats the liberalism of the 1960s‐1970s as sexually discriminatory as well as liberatory. It underlines the exclusions that were part of public policy under the federal G.I. Bill and the New Deal welfare state.

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