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oard of Regents of the University of Oklahoma

Review

Author(s): Ewa M. Thompson

Review by: Ewa M. ThompsonSource: Books Abroad, Vol. 47, No. 2 (Spring, 1973), p. 423

Published by: Board of Regents of the University of OklahomaStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40127297

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Frederic Jameson. The Prison-House of Lan-

guage. A Critical Account of Structuralism

and Russian Formalism. Princeton, N.J.

Princeton University Press. 1972. xiii -f- 230

pages. 9.

WORLD LITERATURE 4 3

It all began, Jameson tells us, with de

Saussure and his distinction between the

synchronic and diachronic vision of language.

In the last hundred years one observes a shift

from the diachronic (historical) way of look-

ing at language to the synchronic one, i.e.,

envisioning the presently existing language as

a multi-levelled system of transformations.

The historical vision entails substantialist

thinking: language elements are seen as sub-

stances which change in the course of years.

The synchronic view of language involves

rather an awareness of relations: it is via the

structure of relations that the language par-

ticles are defined. In fact, Jameson insists,

what we used to think about as the substance

of a language, consists of the sum-total of the

relations between the signs of that language.

Jameson sees two major projections of these

linguistic postulates: one, formalist (where the

result was a circular definition of a work of

art as the sum-total of its devices) and the

other, structuralist (where the investigations

center around three elements of the sign

structure: the signifier, the signified and sig-

nification itself). He stresses the primacy of

the signifier over the signified: fittingly, he

devotes most attention to those structuralists

who tend to focus on the signifier (Levi-

Strauss Lacan Greimas Todorov and

Barthes).

The scope and abstractness of the problems

broached in this book defy an easy summary.

This points both to the merits and the short-

comings of Jameson's work. He has dealt with

a wide variety of French structuralists - those

oriented toward anthropology, economics,

philosophy, history and literature - in a com-

petent, sometimes brilliant way. To my

knowledge no American critic has yet under-

taken so ambitious an enterprise. However,

the book, though basically expository, is no

primer in structuralism: much of the exposi-

tion is abbreviated to the point where it ceases

to inform a reader innocent of the previous

knowledge of the subject and does not yet

begin to offer original theorizing that would

attract an audience for a considerable period

of time. Thus the circle of its readers will be

limited, I think, to those wishing to rehearse

their already present knowledge of French

structuralism and Russian formalism. We are

still waiting for a work which would make

some of the structuralist insights available for

the average student of literature, the way

Understanding Poetry did it for New Criti-

cism.

Ewa M. Thompson

Rice University

Marianne Resting. Auf der Suche nach der

Realitdt. Kritische Schriften zur modernen

Literatur. Munich. Piper. 1972. 292 pages.

19.80 DM.

Ever since Walter Benjamin's essay Das

Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner techni-

schen Reproduzierbarkeit, the awareness of

the relationship between modern art and the

conglomerate of natural science, technology

and economics has reached beyond the con-

fines of orthodox Marxist criticism. Specifical-

ly, the appearance of industrialized and com-

mercialized pop art during the sixties gave

rise to considerations about modern art which

tried to avoid both the incapacity of traditional

Marxist criticism to deal with formal aspects

of modern esthetics, as well as the pitfalls of

the esoteric, intrinsic interpretation of the

new critics.

Kesting's latest book is a case in point. The

essays and reviews of modern literature col-

lected in this volume were written for news-

papers or radio between 1965 and 1971. Nev-

ertheless, the book is surprisingly coherent in

argument and outlook. Marianne Kesting not

only provides the reader with perceptive in-

sights into the crosscurrents of the inter-

national literary scene and with informative,

though short, interpretations of individual

works, but her essays also reflect on some of

the key issues debated in literary circles in the

late sixties, i.e., the death of literature, the

democratization and popularization of art, the

preference of action over writing and the

value of esthetic rebellion.

Kesting examines the roots of modern es-

thetics in the works of Baudelaire, Flaubert

and Mallarme which mirror the definite split

between bourgeois and poetic existence still

dominant today. In all her observations, be it

on early twentieth-century authors, on the

latest French new novels or on the experi-

mental prose of young German authors, Rest-

ing attempts to relate the esthetic answers and

solutions, found by different authors in their

search for reality, to the background of mod-

ern industrial society. She interprets along

socio-economic lines while adhering to a strict-

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