Roman Jakobson and the Transition of German Thought to the Structuralist Paradigm: Towards a New Historiography of Structuralism
This short paper aims to programmatically outline the contours of a general framework for future research on structuralism and its genealogy. I wish to argue that mainstream approaches to the history of structuralism need to be significantly broadened, not only to better account for the contributions of Eastern and Central European thinkers, but also to take into full consideration structuralism's deep, complex and rich roots in 19th Century German thought. To make this point, I will succinctly compare three distinct historiographical models of structuralism (“French”, “East-West”, “Jakobsonian”), each of which provides a very rough and selective, yet highly contrastive map of the intellectual and personal networks that underpinned the development of structuralism up to World War II.