Overview

This provocative book undertakes a new and challenging reading of recent semiotic and structuralist theory, arguing that films, novels, and poems cannot be studied in isolation from their viewers and readers.

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9780195031782

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Reviews

Her explanations are lucid and her exemplary analysis of poetry, fiction, and film are profuse and acute. --Robert Scholes, Brown University Admirably thorough and lucid....Professor Silverman's meticulous unravelling of complexities...puts its case with a vigour and commitment. --Times Literary Supplement An excellent and important, even beautifully written book. --American Film A lucid and imaginative introduction to advanced semiotic research. --David E. Wellberg, Stanford University Highly original treatment of great interest. Brings very important and unusual material (especially from French writers) to bear on structuralism, communication, psychoanalysis, [and] anthropology. --Nur Yalman, Harvard University Admirably organized and written. She makes sense out of a great mass of diverse ideas....Not only a fine introduction to contemporary thought, but a positive contribution to it. --Christopher Collins, New York University Enters an important field of contemporary critical debate and makes the issues forcefully clear. It makes accessible to the English-reading public the relationships between and among structuralism, semiotics, psychoanalysis, feminism, and post-structuralism. --Gayatri Chakrovorty Spivak, University of Texas, Austin Superb text for the topic in a feminist theory class--so lucidly written. --Jeanie K. Forte, University of Tennessee

An attempt to synthesize linguistic philosophy, literary criticism, cinematic structuralism, psychoanalysis, feminism, and more: too dense, too abstract, too all-inclusive - but too intellectually rich to be ignored. Silverman (prof. of Film and Women's Studies at Simon Fraser U.) seems to have started out in a less ambitious vein - her original title was Semiotics: A Methodological Guide - but fortunately and unfortunately she was not content with surveying the work of the major (and mostly French) semiologists, Barthes, Benveniste, Derrida, Lacan, Levi-Strauss, Metz, et al. She begins modestly enough with the early history of semiotics (the science, if it is that, of signification) and the pioneering contributions of Saussure and C. S. Pierce. But before long she sketches out her sweeping thesis that Signification cannot be studied apart from discourse, discourse from subjectivity, or subjectivity from the symbolic order - and the symbolic order ultimately means the whole human (or at least Western) world, upon which Silverman has revolutionary designs. The subject of her punning title is grounded in and constituted by discourse, which cannot be understood without reference to the unconscious and preconscious, which brings up a long exposition of Freudian (mainly from The Interpretation of Dreams) and Lacanian models of subjectivity. This in turn raises some very large semiotic issues: the distance between being and signification ( irreducible in Freud and Lacan), the dominant ways that the paternal signifier organizes the unconscious (the threat of castration and all that), and perhaps most important, the compulsory identification of the subject with sexually differentiated representations (e.g., the child's internalizing the image of the same-sex parent at the end of the Oedipal crisis). Finally Silverman convincingly discusses the treatment and manipulation of the subject by the classic cinematic text, and suggests, not so convincingly, that the strategies outlined in Barthes' S/Z can both alter our relationship to texts and, as needed, liberate us from them. Grimly technical and jargon-ridden in spots (Silverman uses foreground as a verb), but a solid, challenging essay. (Kirkus Reviews)

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