Marxism and the Philosophy of Language

By Valentin Voloshinov, Mikhail Bakhtin, Wilhelm Heinrich Von Aulock

Book Overview

Volosinov's important work, first published in Russian in 1929, had to wait a generation for recognition. This first paperback edition of the English translation will be capital for literary theorists, philosophers, linguists, psychologists, and many others. Volosinov is out to undo the old disciplinary boundaries between linguistics, rhetoric, and poetics in order to construct a new kind of field: semiotics or textual theory. Matejka and Titunik have provided a new preface to discuss Volosinov in relation to the great resurgence of interest in all the writing of the circle of Mikhail Bakhtin.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0674551257
• ISBN13: 9780674551251
• Release Date: January 1986
• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Length: 216 Pages
• Weight: 0.75 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Language is the material of Consciousness

This book is a great classic in the study of language and its relation to ideology. The hollow debates about its authorship falls to the wayside when one considers how this work has revolutionized the study of ideological phenomena. Instead of looking at consciousness as a kind of vacuum to be filled by ideological content, it regards consciousness itself as a kind of substance composed of linguistic matter and riven from within its very core by social contradictions. The synoptic view of linguistics as a discipline divided between the romantic irrationalist approach of Vossler and the systemic semiological approach of Saussure is quite enlightening and original. Although the second part of this book is too difficult for non-linguists with no knowledge of Russian, one can perhaps make some headway into it if one has enough gumption.