November 2009
4 posts
The Structure of the Villanelle
At the LRB blog (which also offers a telling reminiscence of CLS by Jim Holt) , Michael Wood finishes a villanelle begun by Colm Toíbín: “A Structuralist Lament.” Here’ an excerpt: Myth and symbol slide and skid, It’s lost for good, the fine old trail. They don’t thrill at the sign as we once did, Trapped as we were between the ego and the id. A commonly-expressed sentiment,...
reading savagely
</object> With the death of Claude Lévi-Strauss last week at the age of 100, we can think of no better tribute than to undertake a fresh engagement in and reappraisal of his ideas and their impact on the life of the mind. inspired by the linguistics of Ferdinand Saussure, influenced by the historical and humanistic approach to anthropology pioneered by Franz Boas, and with self-styled...
wild thoughts of savage pansies
With the news that Claude Lévi-Strauss died three days ago at the age of 100, I’ve been following a minor detail down the rabbit hole of translation and primitive categories. As is often remarked, the title of Lévi-Strauss’s most famous book, The Savage Mind, is a bit funny in the original French: La Pensée Sauvage, which also may be translated as “The Wild Pansy.” We might...
tracking memes in deep history
Memes are things that go viral, right? And their native habitat is the web, right?Yes, and no. Yes if we sheer away some of the fleece these terms have grown in the age of the internet. Because while memetics has gained popular currency in the age of LOLcats and rickrolling, it’s worth remembering that Richard Dawkins’ coinage (in The Selfish Gene, 1976) predates the full investiture...