Originally published as Le Mirage linguistique, this book remains the definitive study of the role of linguistics in structuralism and poststructuralism. Thomas Pavel examines recent French thought through the work of luminaries such as Lévi-Strauss, Lacan, Foucault, and Derrida. The "spell of language" for Pavel consists of three things: the promise that linguistics seemed to represent for the humanities and social sciences; the distortions, misunderstandings, and willful neglect incumbent upon the "linguistic turn"; and, above all, the break with traditional humanism. He isolates three modes of thought-moderate structuralism, scientific structuralism, and speculative structuralism-and shows how even as they diverge from each other, they all advocate an antihumanist point of view.In this spirited book, Pavel shows that structuralism's flawed use of linguistic theory has rendered hollow the philosophical core of a whole generation of work in the human sciences.

The Spell of Language: Poststructuralism and Speculation

Politics & Social Sciences

Pavel, Thomas G.

Philosophy

Univ of Chicago Pr

Originally published as Le Mirage linguistique, this book remains the definitive study of the role of linguistics in structuralism and poststructuralism. Thomas Pavel examines recent French thought through the work of luminaries such as Lévi-Strauss, Lacan, Foucault, and Derrida. The "spell of language" for Pavel consists of three things: the promise that linguistics seemed to represent for the humanities and social sciences; the distortions, misunderstandings, and willful neglect incumbent upon the "linguistic turn"; and, above all, the break with traditional humanism. He isolates three modes of thought-moderate structuralism, scientific structuralism, and speculative structuralism-and shows how even as they diverge from each other, they all advocate an antihumanist point of view. In this spirited book, Pavel shows that structuralism's flawed use of linguistic theory has rendered hollow the philosophical core of a whole generation of work in the human sciences.

Literature & Fiction

History & Criticism

University of Chicago Press

A generation ago a group of French thinkers attempted to unify philosophy and human science around the notions of structural linguistics. Post-structuralism, as this enterprise became known, has divided the intellectual world into two seemingly implacable camps. This book retraces the birth and development of post-structuralism, examining its intellectual aspirations and identifying its failures. Several key texts, ranging from anthropology to poetics, and from phenomenology to epistemology, are examined.

The Feud of Language: A History of Structuralist Thought

Blackwell Pub.

Creators of fiction demand that we venture into alien spaces, into the worlds of Antigone, Don Quixote, Faust, Sherlock Holmes. Created worlds may resemble the actual world, but they can just as easily be deemed incomplete, precarious, or irrelevant. Why, then, does fiction continue to pull us in and, more interesting perhaps, how? In this beautiful book Pavel provides a poetics of the imaginary worlds of fiction, their properties and their reason for being. 
 Thomas Pavelis a noted literary theorist and a novelist as well. His genial, graceful book has a polemical edge: he notes that structuralism started as a project to infuse new life into literary studies through the devices of linguistics. That project undercut referential issues, however, and is now obsolete. Pavelargues that what matters about fiction is its relation to the human capacity of invention and the complex requirements of imagination. He moves decisively beyond the constraints of formalism and textualism toward a diverse theory of fiction that is sensitive to both literary and philosophical concerns. Along the way he takes its through special landscapes that reveal the inextricability of art, religion, and myth. This is a venturesome book of the first order.

Fictional Worlds

Harvard University Press

Creators of fiction demand that we venture into alien spaces, into the worlds of Antigone, Don Quixote, Faust, Sherlock Holmes. Created worlds may resemble the actual world, but they can just as easily be deemed incomplete, precarious, or irrelevant. Why, then, does fiction continue to pull us in and, more interesting perhaps, how? In this beautiful book Thomas Pavel provides a poetics of the imaginary worlds of fiction, their properties, and their reason for being.
Pavel is a noted literary theorist and a novelist as well. His genial, graceful book has a polemical edge: he notes that structuralism started as a project to infuse new life into literary studies through the devices of linguistics. That project undercut referential issues, however, and is now obsolete. Pavel argues that what matters about fiction is its relation to the human capacity of invention and the complex requirements of imagination. He moves decisively beyond the constraints of formalism and textualism toward a diverse theory of fiction that is sensitive to both literary and philosophical concerns. Along the way he takes us through special landscapes that reveal the inextricability of art, religion, and myth. This is a venturesome book of the first order.

The Lives of the Novel: A History

A bold new account of the history of the novel, from ancient Greece to the present
This is a bold and original original history of the novel from ancient Greece to the vibrant world of contemporary fiction. In this wide-ranging survey, Thomas Pavel argues that the driving force behind the novel's evolution has been a rivalry between stories that idealize human behavior and those that ridicule and condemn it. Impelled by this conflict, the novel moved from depicting strong souls to sensitive hearts and, finally, to enigmatic psyches. Pavel analyzes more than a hundred novels from Europe, North and South America, Asia, and beyond, resulting in a provocative reinterpretation of its development.
According to Pavel, the earliest novels were implausible because their characters were either perfect or villainous. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, novelists strove for greater credibility by describing the inner lives of ideal characters in minute detail (as in Samuel Richardson's case), or by closely examining the historical and social environment (as Walter Scott and Balzac did). Yet the earlier rivalry continued: Henry Fielding held the line against idealism, defending the comic tradition with its flawed characters, while Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot offered a rejoinder to social realism with their idealized vision of strong, generous, and sensitive women. In the twentieth century, modernists like Proust and Joyce sought to move beyond this conflict and capture the enigmatic workings of the psyche.
Pavel concludes his compelling account by showing how the old tensions persist even within today's pluralism, as popular novels about heroes coexist with a wealth of other kinds of works, from satire to social and psychological realism.

Princeton University Press

The Poetics of Plot: The Case of English Renaissance Drama (Theory & History of Literature)

Univ of Minnesota Pr

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Pavel, Thomas G.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Pavel, Thomas G.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Pavel, Thomas G.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Spell of Language: Poststructuralism and Speculation

The Spell of Language: Poststructuralism and Speculation

The Feud of Language: A History of Structuralist Thought

Fictional Worlds

Fictional Worlds

The Lives of the Novel: A History

The Lives of the Novel: A History

The Poetics of Plot: The Case of English Renaissance Drama (Theory & History of Literature)