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Algirdas Greimas | |
|---|---|
| Born | Algirdas Julius Greimas (1917-03-09)9 March 1917 Tula, Russian Empire |
| Died | 27 February 1992(1992-02-27) (aged 74) Paris, France |
| Citizenship | Lithuania, France |
| Alma mater | Vytautas Magnus University, Kaunas;University of Grenoble;Sorbonne, Paris (PhD, 1949) |
| Known for | Greimas square,actantial model,isotopy |
| Spouse | Teresa Mary Keane |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Semiotics,structural linguistics |
| Institutions | École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales |
Algirdas Julien Greimas (French:[alɡiʁdasʒyljɛ̃gʁɛmas];[1] bornAlgirdas Julius Greimas; 9 March 1917 – 27 February 1992) was aLithuanian literary scientist who wrote most of his body of work in French while living in France. Greimas is known among other things for theGreimas square (le carré sémiotique). He is, along withRoland Barthes, considered the most prominent of the Frenchsemioticians. With his training instructural linguistics, he added to the theory ofsignification, plastic semiotics, and laid the foundations for the Parisian school of semiotics. Among Greimas's major contributions to semiotics are the concepts ofisotopy, theactantial model, the narrative program, and the semiotics of the natural world. He also researchedLithuanian mythology andProto-Indo-European religion, and was influential insemiotic literary criticism.
Greimas's father, Julius Greimas, 1882–1942, a teacher and later school inspector, was fromLiudvinavas in theSuvalkija region of present-dayLithuania. His mother, Konstancija Greimienė, née Mickevičiūtė (Mickevičius), 1886–1956, a secretary, was fromKalvarija.[2] They lived inTula,Russia, when he was born, where they ran away as refugees during World War I. They returned with him to Lithuania when he was two years old. His baptismal names areAlgirdas Julius[3] but he used the French version of his middle name,Julien, while he lived abroad. He did not speak any language other thanLithuanian untilpreparatory middle school, where he started with German and then French, which opened the door for his early philosophical readings inhigh school ofFriedrich Nietzsche andArthur Schopenhauer. After attending schools in several towns, as his family moved, and finishingRygiškių Jonas High School inMarijampolė in 1934, he studied law atVytautas Magnus University,Kaunas, and then drifted toward linguistics at theUniversity of Grenoble, from which he graduated in 1939 with a paper onFranco-Provençal dialects.[4] He hoped to focus next on early medieval linguistics (substratetoponyms in theAlps).[5] However, in July 1939, with war looming, the Lithuanian government drafted him into a military academy.
The Soviet ultimatum led to a new "people's government" in Soviet-occupied Lithuania which Greimas was sympathetic to. In July 1940, he gave speeches urging Lithuanians to elect leaders who would vote in favor of annexation by the Soviet Union. As his friend Aleksys Churginas advised, in every speech he would mention Stalin and end by clapping for himself. In October, he was discharged into the reserve, and he began teaching French, German, Lithuanian, and humanities at schools in Šiauliai. He fell in love with socialist Hania (Ona) Lukauskaitė, who later became an anti-Soviet conspirator withJonas Noreika, served ten years in a lager inVorkuta, and was a founder of theLithuanian Helsinki Group of anti-Soviet dissidents. Greimas became an avid reader of Marx. In March 1941, Greimas's friend, Vladas Pauža, a boy scout and fellow teacher, enlisted him in theLithuanian Activist Front. This underground network was preparing for a Nazi German invasion as the opportunity to restore Lithuania's independence. On 14 June 1941, the Soviets detained his parents, arresting his father and sending him toKrasnoyarsk Krai, where he died in 1942. His mother was deported toAltai Krai. Meanwhile, during these traumatic deportations, Greimas had been mobilized as an army officer to write up the property of detained Lithuanians. Greimas became an anti-Communist but retained a lifelong affinity with Marxist, leftist, and liberal ideas.[6]
Nazi Germany's invading forces entered Šiauliai on 26 June 1941. The next day, Greimas met with other partisans and was put in charge of a platoon. He handed down an order from the German Commandant to round up 100 Jews to sweep the streets. He felt uncomfortable and did not return the next day. Nevertheless, he became an editor of the weeklyTėvynė, which urged ethnic cleansing of Jews from Lithuania.[citation needed] The nominal editor, Vladas Pauža, was a proponent of genocide.[7] In 1942, in Kaunas, Greimas became active in the undergroundLithuanian Freedom Fighters Union, which derived from theLithuanian Nationalist Party, which the Nazis had banned in December 1941. He grew close to life long liberal-minded friends Bronys Raila, Stasys Žakevičius-Žymantas, and Jurgis Valiulis.
In 1944, he enrolled for graduate study at theSorbonne in Paris and specialized inlexicography, namelytaxonomies of exact, interrelated definitions. He wrote a thesis on the vocabulary of fashion (a topic later popularized byRoland Barthes), for which he received a PhD in 1949.[8]
Greimas began his academic career as a teacher at a French Catholic boarding school for girls inAlexandria in Egypt,[5] where he would take part in a weekly discussion group of about a dozen European researchers that included a philosopher, a historian, and a sociologist.[9] Early on, he also metRoland Barthes, with whom he remained close for the next 15 years.[5] In 1959, he moved on to universities in Ankara and Istanbul in Turkey, and then toPoitiers in France. In 1965, he became professor at theÉcole des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris, where he taught for almost 25 years. He co-founded and became Secretary General of theInternational Association for Semiotic Studies.
Greimas died in 1992 inParis, and was buried at his mother's resting place,[10]Petrašiūnai Cemetery in Kaunas, Lithuania.[11] (His parents weredeported to Siberia during theSoviet occupation. His mother managed to return in 1954; his father perished and his grave is unknown, but he has a symbolic tombstone at the cemetery.[12]) He was survived by his wife, Teresa Mary Keane.[13]
Greimas's first published essayCervantes ir jo don Kichotas ("Cervantes and his Don Quixote")[14] came out in the literary journalVarpai, which he helped to found, during the period of alternatingNazi and Soviet occupations of Lithuania. Although a review of the first Lithuanian translation ofDon Quixote,[15] it addressed partly the issue of one's resistance to circumstances[16] – even when doomed, defiance can at least aim at the preservation of one's dignity (Nebijokime būti donkichotai'Let's not be afraid to be Don Quixotes').[14] The first work of direct significance to his subsequent research was his doctoral thesisLa Mode en 1830. Essai de description du vocabulaire vestimentaire d' après les journaux de modes [sic]de l'époque'Fashion in 1830. A Study of the Vocabulary of Clothes based on the Fashion Magazines of the Times'.[17] He leftlexicology soon after, acknowledging the limitations of the discipline in its concentration on the word as a unit and in its basic aim of classification, but he never ceased to maintain his lexicological convictions. He published three dictionaries throughout his career.[citation needed] During his decade in Alexandria, the discussions in his circle of friends helped broaden his interests. The topics included Greimas's early influences – the works of the founder ofstructural linguisticsFerdinand de Saussure and his follower, Danish linguistLouis Hjelmslev, the initiator ofcomparative mythologyGeorges Dumézil, thestructural anthropologistClaude Lévi-Strauss, the Russian specialist in fairy talesVladimir Propp, the researcher into the aesthetics of theaterÉtienne Souriau, thephenomenologistsEdmund Husserl andMaurice Merleau-Ponty, thepsychoanalystGaston Bachelard, and the novelist and art historianAndré Malraux.[18]
Greimas proposed an original method fordiscourse semiotics that evolved over a thirty-year period. His starting point began with a profound dissatisfaction with the structural linguistics of the mid-century that studied only phonemes (minimal sound units of every language) and morphemes (grammatical units that occur in the combination of phonemes). These grammatical units could generate an infinite number of sentences, the sentence remaining the largest unit of analysis. Such a molecular model did not permit the analysis of units beyond the sentence.
Greimas begins by positing the existence of asemantic universe that he defined as the sum of all possible meanings that can be produced by the value systems of the entire culture of an ethno-linguistic community. As the semantic universe cannot possibly be conceived of in its entirety, Greimas was led to introduce the notion ofsemantic micro-universe anddiscourse universe, as actualized in written, spoken or iconic texts. To come to grips with the problem of signification or the production of meaning, Greimas had to transpose one level of language (thetext) into another level of language (themetalanguage) and work out adequate techniques oftransposition.
The descriptive procedures ofnarratology and the notion ofnarrativity are at the very base of Greimassian semiotics of discourse. His initial hypothesis is that meaning is only apprehensible if it is articulated or narrativized. Second, for him, narrative structures can be perceived in other systems not necessarily dependent upon natural languages. This leads him to posit the existence of two levels of analysis and representation: asurface and adeep level, which forms a common trunk where narrativity is situated and organized anterior to its manifestation. The signification of a phenomenon does not therefore depend on the mode of its manifestation, but since it originates at the deep level, it cuts through all forms of linguistic and non-linguistic manifestation. Greimas' semiotics, which isgenerative andtransformational, goes through three phases of development. He begins by working out asemiotics of action (sémiotique de l'action), wheresubjects are defined in terms of their quest forobjects, following acanonical narrative schema, which is a formal framework made up of three successive sequences: amandate, anaction and anevaluation. He then constructs anarrative grammar and works out a syntax ofnarrative programs in which subjects arejoined up with orseparated from objects of value. In the second phase, he works out acognitive semiotics (sémiotique cognitive), where in order to perform, subjects must becompetent to do so. The subjects' competence is organized by means of amodal grammar that accounts for their existence and performance. This modal semiotics opens the way to the final phase that studies howpassions modify actional and cognitive performance of subjects (sémiotique de passions), and how belief and knowledge modify the competence and performance of these very same subjects.
He later began researching and reconstructingLithuanian mythology. He based his work on the methods ofVladimir Propp,Georges Dumézil,Claude Lévi-Strauss, andMarcel Detienne. He published the results inApie dievus ir žmones: lietuvių mitologijos studijos (Of Gods and Men: Studies in Lithuanian Mythology) 1979, andTautos atminties beieškant (In Search of National Memory) 1990. He also wrote onProto-Indo-European religion.
Republished with corrections in: Algirdas Julien Greimas (Thomas F. Broden and Françoise Ravaux-Kirkpatrick, eds.):La mode en 1830, langage et société: écrits de jeunesse. Paris: Presse universitaires de France, 2000.ISBN 2-13-050488-4
