What is rock and roll and where does it come from? In this new study of music, literature, and culture, Perry Meisel shows how rock and roll joins both Romanticism and the blues tradition by testing the boundaries they share: boundaries between freedom and irony, between country and city, between the iconic figures of cowboy (e.g. John Wayne) and dandy (e.g. Oscar Wilde). In a series of startling juxtapositions, Meisel looks at rhythm and blues, Emerson and the cowboy, urban blues, the dandy and 60's psychedelia, Willa Cather, Miles Davis, and Virginia Woolf. In the process, Meisel shows how "popular" and "high" culture are hardly fixed categories, and in fact share deep roots each vainly affects to disdain.

The argument of this book is a simple one: that criticism after theory is a single movement of thought defined by synthesis and continuity rather than by conflict and change. The most influential figures in criticism since Saussure-Bakhtin, Derrida, and Foucault-are wholly consistent with Saussure's foundational Course in General Linguistics (1916) no matter the traditions of complaint that have followed in Saussure's wake from Bakhtin forward. These complaints vitiate-despite themselves and often hilariously so-the misconceptions that have made cottage industries out of quarrels with Saussurean semiology that are based on notions of Saussure that are incorrect. The materialist criticism dominant today is actually dependent upon on the legacy of a presumably formalist structuralism rather than a step beyond it. New Historicism, postcolonialism, gender studies, environmental criticism, archive studies, even shared and surface reading are, like deconstruction, the by-products of Saussure's structuralism, not its foils. Saussure's sign is sensory and concrete. Language and materiality are not distinct but one and the same-history, society, the psychological subject, even the environment are systems of signs, material archives read and reread by futures that produce the past after the fact. Without Saussure, contemporary criticism would have no identifiable or effective source. The book begins with chapters on Saussure and Derrida, Bakhtin and Shakespeare, and Freud and Foucault followed by chapters on Victorian and American fiction, D.H. Lawrence and modern poetry, Virginia Woolf and Melanie Klein, and the historicist tropology of psychoanalysis. It concludes with a coda in life writing on the author's epileptic disability.

In this book, Perry Meisel argues that Freud's texts are properly literary, and casts Freud as both literary theoretician and practitioner. Here, after an introductory reception history of Freud as literature, Meisel provides a series of close readings of Freud's major texts that take literary representation as their central focus.
As for Freud's influence on others, it, too, is structured like a literary history, argues Meisel. He discusses Freud's influence on modernism, Strachey's "Standard Edition" (once again the subject of debate with the recent Penguin retranslations), and Freud's influence on Michel Foucault. Finally, we explore the relationship of Freud and literature. Does an understanding of how Freud himself writes and influences help us to read literature and interpret it anew?

The founder of modern linguistics, Ferdinand de Saussure inaugurated semiology, structuralism, and deconstruction and made possible the work of Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Lacan, thus enabling the development of French feminism, gender studies, New Historicism, and postcolonialism. Based on Saussure's lectures, "Course in General Linguistics" (1916) traces the rise and fall of the historical linguistics in which Saussure was trained, the synchronic or structural linguistics with which he replaced it, and the new look of diachronic linguistics that followed this change. Most important, Saussure presents the principles of a new linguistic science that includes the invention of semiology, or the theory of the "signifier," the "signified," and the "sign" that they combine to produce.

This is the first critical edition of "Course in General Linguistics" to appear in English and restores Wade Baskin's original translation of 1959, in which the terms "signifier" and "signified" are introduced into English in this precise way. Baskin renders Saussure clearly and accessibly, allowing readers to experience his shift of the theory of reference from mimesis to performance and his expansion of poetics to include all media, including the life sciences and environmentalism. An introduction situates Saussure within the history of ideas and describes the history of scholarship that made "Course in General Linguistics" legendary. New endnotes enlarge Saussure's contexts to include literary criticism, cultural studies, and philosophy.

The founder of modern linguistics, Ferdinand de Saussure inaugurated semiology, structuralism, and deconstruction and made possible the work of Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Lacan, thus enabling the development of French feminism, gender studies, New Historicism, and postcolonialism. Based on Saussure's lectures, "Course in General Linguistics" (1916) traces the rise and fall of the historical linguistics in which Saussure was trained, the synchronic or structural linguistics with which he replaced it, and the new look of diachronic linguistics that followed this change. Most important, Saussure presents the principles of a new linguistic science that includes the invention of semiology, or the theory of the "signifier," the "signified," and the "sign" that they combine to produce.

This is the first critical edition of "Course in General Linguistics" to appear in English and restores Wade Baskin's original translation of 1959, in which the terms "signifier" and "signified" are introduced into English in this precise way. Baskin renders Saussure clearly and accessibly, allowing readers to experience his shift of the theory of reference from mimesis to performance and his expansion of poetics to include all media, including the life sciences and environmentalism. An introduction situates Saussure within the history of ideas and describes the history of scholarship that made "Course in General Linguistics" legendary. New endnotes enlarge Saussure's contexts to include literary criticism, cultural studies, and philosophy.