Roman Jakobson

Roman Osipovich Jakobson (1896–1982) famously characterized himself as a “Russian philologist. Period.” He arranged for his gravestone to be engraved simply with the words “Roman Jakobson—RUSSKIJ FILOLOG.” Jakobson’s Russianness, and his love of language and literature, are beyond dispute. However, his intellectual contributions far exceed the intersection of the two terms of his self-description. Jakobson was a dynamic and protean scholar, who wrote about Poetics, Phonology, historical linguistics (especially Slavic), morphosyntax, semiotics, psycholinguistics, and cultural and literary history. He participated avidly in a succession of scholarly collaboratives which generated ideas about language and literature that radiated outward to other thinkers and disciplines. In a first and formative instance, Jakobson was a precocious member of the avant garde literary-artistic Futurist movement in Moscow in the 1910s. In 1926, he co-founded the Prague Linguistic Circle, which developed a distinctive response to the structuralist linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure (b. 1857–d. 1913) that was then spreading across Europe. Following his immigration to America in 1941, Jakobson co-founded the Linguistic Circle of New York and taught at the French-Belgian university in exile, the École Libre des Hautes Études, before joining the faculty of Columbia University (in 1946), Harvard (in 1949), and MIT (in 1957, concurrent with his appointment at Harvard). Working steadily into his eighties through these successive dislocations, Jakobson produced a flood of texts and lectures addressed to diverse audiences, often coauthored with colleagues or former students. Much of his attention went to close linguistic analysis of literature, with a special focus on the formal linguistic features and sound patterns of poetry. A second theme was his work in phonology, especially in his collaboration with fellow Russian émigré and Prague Circle member Nikolai Trubetzkoy (b. 1890–d. 1938). Jakobson resolved phonemes into bundles of hierarchically organized distinctive features, emphasizing acoustic over articulatory definitions, in which one member has default or “unmarked” status relative to the other. The notion of distinctive features influenced generative phonology and other approaches in the 1960s, although Jakobson’s contributions are not always acknowledged. Another of Jakobson’s most significant accomplishments was his role in transmitting structuralism from Europe to the United States, especially during his residence in New York when his lectures on Saussure at the École Libre influenced anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss (b. 1908–d. 2009). Through Jakobson, structuralist ideas passed to Lévi-Strauss, and then to sociology, philosophy, literary criticism, and 20th-century humanities in general, before meeting opposition from poststructuralism in the late 1960s.