Abstract

This book falls midway between being a treatise and being a history. Incomplete, intentionally, as a history, it is also unfortunately inadequate as a treatise, though it is a most useful and interesting volume. Todorov has given us selected and highly selective chapters in the history of western reflection upon symbolization as a mode of signifying, the seriation and presentation of materials being rather erratically informed by a consciousness of the contemporary scope and intents of semiotics as an integrative discipline. The book begins with a relatively synthetic discussion of the "birth of western semiotics" in "late" Greek philosophy and its focusing and semi-systematization in the work of Augustine, whom Todorov shows to have immense semiotic importance. Todorov then proceeds to give an account of the attempts to systematize the various figures of thought and speech in classical rhetorical theory, whose scope, limitations, rise, and decline are charted in chapters 2 and 3. Chapter 4 and 5 discuss the connections between symbolization as a motivated discourse and the specifically aesthetic problem of imitation, which informed aesthetic theories from antiquity to the Romantic crisis, to whose delineation Todorov devoted the longest and best chapter in the book, showing in interesting detail the progressive subjectification of the process of symbolization and aesthetic creation that took place during the original German portion of the movement and which, as is well known, influenced the English portion primarily through Coleridge's "translation" activities. Chapter 7 treats the modern "scientific" temptation, epitomized in Lévy-Bruhl's studies on "primitive thought," to ascribe "symbolic" and "mystical" structures to other periods and places while denying it to one's own thought processes, a procedure ironically belied in Lévy-Bruhl's methodological practice. Chapter 8, on Freud, sheds very little new light, and scarcely is adequate to more than a perfunctory knowledge of the old light, on this most important thorny figure in modern consciousness, a deficiency due in part to Todorov's excision of materials from the original French edition. The following chapter on de Saussure focuses, with some interesting biographical help, on his tendency to avoid the problem of motivated discourse in favor of an effectively exclusive concentration on the implications of his axiom or theorem on the arbitrariness of the sign. The final chapter offers an appreciation rather than an account of the paradigmatic work of Jakobson, whom Todorov obviously, and rightly, considers the hero of modern attempts to weld linguistics and poetics together. These ten chapters are preceded by a short apologia pro libro suo and rounded off by a short oxymoronic conclusion entitled "Openings."