Algirdas Julien Greimas
Encyclopedia
Algirdas Julien Greimas (born Algirdas Julius Greimas), known among other things for the Greimas Square
, is considered, along with Roland Barthes
, the most prominent of the French semiotician
s. With his training in linguistics, he added to the theory of signification
and laid the foundations for the Paris School of Semiotics. Among Greimas's major contributions to semiotics are the concepts of isotopy
, the actantial model
, the narrative program, and the semiotics of the natural world. He also researched Lithuanian mythology
and Proto-Indo-European religion
, and was influential in semiotic literary criticism
.
region. His mother Konstancija, née Mickevičiūtė (Mickevičius), a secretary, was from Kalvarija. They lived in Tula
, Russia, when he was born and returned with him to Lithuania when he was two years old. His baptismal names are Algirdas Julius, he used the French version of his middle name, Julien, while he lived abroad. He did not speak another language than Lithuanian
until preparatory middle school
where he started with German and then French, which opened the door for his early philosophical readings in high school
– Friedrich Nietzsche
and Arthur Schopenhauer
. After attending schools in several towns, as his family moved, and finishing Rygiškių Jono High School in Marijampolė
in 1934, he studied law at Vytautas Magnus University, Kaunas
, and then drifted toward linguistics at the University of Grenoble
, from which he graduated in 1939 with a paper on Franco-Provençal dialects. He hoped to focus next on early medieval linguistics (substrate toponyms
in the Alps
), but the beginning of World War II returned him to Lithuania for military service, where he then taught, worked as an editor, and published literary reviews and essays on culture.
In 1944 he enrolled for graduate study at the Sorbonne
in Paris and specialized in lexicography
, namely taxonomies
of exact, interrelated definitions. He wrote a thesis on the vocabulary of fashion (a topic later popularized by Roland Barthes), for which he received a PhD in 1949.
Greimas began his academic career as a teacher at a French Catholic boarding school for girls in Alexandria
in Egypt, 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. Early on, he also met Roland Barthes
with whom he remained close for the next 15 years. In 1959 he moved on to universities in Ankara and Istanbul in Turkey, and then to Poitiers in France. In 1965 he became professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales
(EHESS) in Paris where he taught for almost 25 years. He co-founded and became Secretary General of the International Association for Semiotic Studies
.
Greimas died in 1992 in Paris
, and was buried at his mother' resting place, Petrašiūnai Cemetery
in Kaunas, Lithuania (his parents were deported during the Soviet 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). He was survived by his wife Teresa Mary Keane.
and his Don Quixote") came out in the literary journal Varpai, which he helped to found, during the period of alternating Nazi and Soviet occupations of Lithuania. Although a review of the first Lithuanian translation of Don Quixote, it addressed partly the issue of one's resistance to circumstances – 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"). The first work of direct significance to his subsequent research was his doctoral thesis "La 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"). He left lexicology
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. 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 of structural linguistics
Ferdinand de Saussure
and his follower, Danish linguist Louis Hjelmslev
, the initiator of comparative mythology
Georges Dumézil
, the structural anthropologist
Claude Lévi-Strauss
, the Russian specialist in fairy tales Vladimir Propp
, the researcher into the aesthetics of theater Étienne Souriau
, the phenomenologists Edmund Husserl
and Maurice Merleau-Ponty
, the psychoanalyst
Gaston Bachelard
, and the novelist and art historian André Malraux
.
, isotopy
, the actantial model
, the narrative program, and the semiotics of the natural world. He was influential in semiotic literary criticism
.
. He based his work on the methods of Vladimir Propp
, Georges Dumézil
, Claude Lévi-Strauss
, and Marcel Detienne
. He published the results in Apie dievus ir žmones: lietuvių mitologijos studijos (Of Gods and Men: Studies in Lithuanian Mythology) 1979, and Tautos atminties beieškant (In Search of National Memory) 1990. He also wrote on Proto-Indo-European religion
.
Semiotic square
The Semiotic Square, also known as the Greimas Square, is a tool used in the structural analysis of the relationships between semiotic signs. The Semiotic Square was developed by Algirdas J. Greimas, a Lithuanian linguist and semiotician and first presented in Semantique Structurale This book was...
, is considered, along with Roland Barthes
Roland Barthes
Roland Gérard Barthes was a French literary theorist, philosopher, critic, and semiotician. Barthes' ideas explored a diverse range of fields and he influenced the development of schools of theory including structuralism, semiotics, existentialism, social theory, Marxism, anthropology and...
, the most prominent of the French semiotician
Semiotics
Semiotics, also called semiotic studies or semiology, is the study of signs and sign processes , indication, designation, likeness, analogy, metaphor, symbolism, signification, and communication...
s. With his training in linguistics, he added to the theory of signification
Sign (semiotics)
A sign is understood as a discrete unit of meaning in semiotics. It is defined as "something that stands for something, to someone in some capacity" It includes words, images, gestures, scents, tastes, textures, sounds – essentially all of the ways in which information can be...
and laid the foundations for the Paris School of Semiotics. Among Greimas's major contributions to semiotics are the concepts of isotopy
Isotopy (semiotics)
In a story, we detect an isotopy when there is a repetition of a basic meaning trait ; such repetition, establishing some level of familiarity within the story, allows for a uniform reading/interpretation of it. An example of a sentence containing an isotopy is I drink some water...
, the actantial model
Actantial model
In structural semantics, the actantial model, also called the actantial narrative schema, is a tool used to analyze the action that takes place in a story, whether real or fictional...
, the narrative program, and the semiotics of the natural world. He also researched Lithuanian mythology
Lithuanian mythology
Lithuanian mythology is an example of Baltic mythology, developed by Lithuanians throughout the centuries.-History of scholarship:Surviving information about Baltic paganism in general is very sketchy and incomplete. As with most ancient Indo-European cultures Lithuanian mythology is an example of...
and Proto-Indo-European religion
Proto-Indo-European religion
Proto-Indo-European religion is the hypothesized religion of the Proto-Indo-European peoples based on the existence of similarities among the deities, religious practices and mythologies of the Indo-European peoples. Reconstruction of the hypotheses below is based on linguistic evidence using the...
, and was influential in semiotic literary criticism
Semiotic literary criticism
Semiotic literary criticism, also called literary semiotics, is the approach to literary criticism informed by the theory of signs or semiotics...
.
Biography
Greimas's father Julius Greimas, a teacher and later school inspector, was from Liudvinavas in the SuvalkijaSuvalkija
Suvalkija or Sudovia is the smallest of the five cultural regions of Lithuania. Its unofficial capital is Marijampolė. People from Suvalkija are called suvalkiečiai or suvalkietis . It is located south of the Neman River, in the former territory of Vilkaviškis bishopric...
region. His mother Konstancija, née Mickevičiūtė (Mickevičius), a secretary, was from Kalvarija. They lived in Tula
Tula, Russia
Tula is an industrial city and the administrative center of Tula Oblast, Russia. It is located south of Moscow, on the Upa River. Population: -History:...
, Russia, when he was born and returned with him to Lithuania when he was two years old. His baptismal names are Algirdas Julius, he used the French version of his middle name, Julien, while he lived abroad. He did not speak another language than Lithuanian
Lithuanian language
Lithuanian is the official state language of Lithuania and is recognized as one of the official languages of the European Union. There are about 2.96 million native Lithuanian speakers in Lithuania and about 170,000 abroad. Lithuanian is a Baltic language, closely related to Latvian, although they...
until preparatory middle school
Gymnasium (school)
A gymnasium is a type of school providing secondary education in some parts of Europe, comparable to English grammar schools or sixth form colleges and U.S. college preparatory high schools. The word γυμνάσιον was used in Ancient Greece, meaning a locality for both physical and intellectual...
where he started with German and then French, which opened the door for his early philosophical readings in high school
Gymnasium (school)
A gymnasium is a type of school providing secondary education in some parts of Europe, comparable to English grammar schools or sixth form colleges and U.S. college preparatory high schools. The word γυμνάσιον was used in Ancient Greece, meaning a locality for both physical and intellectual...
– Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was a 19th-century German philosopher, poet, composer and classical philologist...
and Arthur Schopenhauer
Arthur Schopenhauer
Arthur Schopenhauer was a German philosopher known for his pessimism and philosophical clarity. At age 25, he published his doctoral dissertation, On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, which examined the four separate manifestations of reason in the phenomenal...
. After attending schools in several towns, as his family moved, and finishing Rygiškių Jono High School in Marijampolė
Marijampole
Marijampolė is an industrial city and the capital of the Marijampolė County in the south of Lithuania, bordering Poland and Russian Kaliningrad oblast, and Lake Vištytis. The population of Marijampolė is 48,700...
in 1934, he studied law at Vytautas Magnus University, Kaunas
Kaunas
Kaunas is the second-largest city in Lithuania and has historically been a leading centre of Lithuanian economic, academic, and cultural life. Kaunas was the biggest city and the center of a powiat in Trakai Voivodeship of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania since 1413. During Russian Empire occupation...
, and then drifted toward linguistics at the University of Grenoble
University of Grenoble
University of Grenoble or Grenoble University was a university in Grenoble, France until 1970, when it was split into several different institutions:...
, from which he graduated in 1939 with a paper on Franco-Provençal dialects. He hoped to focus next on early medieval linguistics (substrate toponyms
Toponymy
Toponymy is the scientific study of place names , their origins, meanings, use and typology. The word "toponymy" is derived from the Greek words tópos and ónoma . Toponymy is itself a branch of onomastics, the study of names of all kinds...
in the Alps
Grésivaudan
The Grésivaudan is a valley of the French Alps, situated mostly in the Isère. Etymologically, Graisivaudan comes from roots meaning "Grenoble" and "valley". It comprises the alluvial plain of the Isère River from Grenoble to the confluence of the Arc; or, more recently, the entire valley of the...
), but the beginning of World War II returned him to Lithuania for military service, where he then taught, worked as an editor, and published literary reviews and essays on culture.
University of Paris
The University of Paris was a university located in Paris, France and one of the earliest to be established in Europe. It was founded in the mid 12th century, and officially recognized as a university probably between 1160 and 1250...
in Paris and specialized in lexicography
Lexicography
Lexicography is divided into two related disciplines:*Practical lexicography is the art or craft of compiling, writing and editing dictionaries....
, namely taxonomies
Taxonomy
Taxonomy is the science of identifying and naming species, and arranging them into a classification. The field of taxonomy, sometimes referred to as "biological taxonomy", revolves around the description and use of taxonomic units, known as taxa...
of exact, interrelated definitions. He wrote a thesis on the vocabulary of fashion (a topic later popularized by Roland Barthes), for which he received a PhD in 1949.
Greimas began his academic career as a teacher at a French Catholic boarding school for girls in Alexandria
Alexandria
Alexandria is the second-largest city of Egypt, with a population of 4.1 million, extending about along the coast of the Mediterranean Sea in the north central part of the country; it is also the largest city lying directly on the Mediterranean coast. It is Egypt's largest seaport, serving...
in Egypt, 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. Early on, he also met Roland Barthes
Roland Barthes
Roland Gérard Barthes was a French literary theorist, philosopher, critic, and semiotician. Barthes' ideas explored a diverse range of fields and he influenced the development of schools of theory including structuralism, semiotics, existentialism, social theory, Marxism, anthropology and...
with whom he remained close for the next 15 years. In 1959 he moved on to universities in Ankara and Istanbul in Turkey, and then to Poitiers in France. In 1965 he became professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales
École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales
The École des hautes études en sciences sociales is a leading French institution for research and higher education, a Grand Établissement. Its mission is research and research training in the social sciences, including the relationship these latter maintain with the natural and life sciences...
(EHESS) in Paris where he taught for almost 25 years. He co-founded and became Secretary General of the International Association for Semiotic Studies
International Association for Semiotic Studies
International Association for Semiotic Studies is the major world organisation of semioticians, established in 1969....
.
Greimas died in 1992 in Paris
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
, and was buried at his mother' resting place, Petrašiūnai Cemetery
Petrašiunai Cemetery
Petrašiūnai Cemetery is Lithuania's premiere last resting place formally designated for graves of people influential in national history, politics, arts, and science.- Location :...
in Kaunas, Lithuania (his parents were deported during the Soviet 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). He was survived by his wife Teresa Mary Keane.
Early
Greimas's first published essay "Cervantes ir jo don Kichotas" ("CervantesMiguel de Cervantes
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra was a Spanish novelist, poet, and playwright. His magnum opus, Don Quixote, considered the first modern novel, is a classic of Western literature, and is regarded amongst the best works of fiction ever written...
and his Don Quixote") came out in the literary journal Varpai, which he helped to found, during the period of alternating Nazi and Soviet occupations of Lithuania. Although a review of the first Lithuanian translation of Don Quixote, it addressed partly the issue of one's resistance to circumstances – 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"). The first work of direct significance to his subsequent research was his doctoral thesis "La 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"). He left lexicology
Lexicology
Lexicology is the part of linguistics which studies words, their nature and meaning, words' elements, relations between words , word groups and the whole lexicon....
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. 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 of structural linguistics
Structural Linguistics
Structural linguistics is an approach to linguistics originating from the work of Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. De Saussure's Course in General Linguistics, published posthumously in 1916, stressed examining language as a static system of interconnected units...
Ferdinand de Saussure
Ferdinand de Saussure
Ferdinand de Saussure was a Swiss linguist whose ideas laid a foundation for many significant developments in linguistics in the 20th century. He is widely considered one of the fathers of 20th-century linguistics...
and his follower, Danish linguist Louis Hjelmslev
Louis Hjelmslev
Louis Hjelmslev was a Danish linguist whose ideas formed the basis of the Copenhagen School of linguistics. Born into an academic family , Hjelmslev studied comparative linguistics in Copenhagen, Prague and Paris...
, the initiator of comparative mythology
Comparative mythology
Comparative mythology is the comparison of myths from different cultures in an attempt to identify shared themes and characteristics. Comparative mythology has served a variety of academic purposes...
Georges Dumézil
Georges Dumézil
Georges Dumézil was a French comparative philologist best known for his analysis of sovereignty and power in Proto-Indo-European religion and society...
, the structural anthropologist
Structural anthropology
Structural anthropology is based on Claude Lévi-Strauss' idea that people think about the world in terms of binary opposites—such as high and low, inside and outside, person and animal, life and death—and that every culture can be understood in terms of these opposites...
Claude Lévi-Strauss
Claude Lévi-Strauss
Claude Lévi-Strauss was a French anthropologist and ethnologist, and has been called, along with James George Frazer, the "father of modern anthropology"....
, the Russian specialist in fairy tales Vladimir Propp
Vladimir Propp
Vladimir Yakovlevich Propp was a Russian and Soviet formalist scholar who analyzed the basic plot components of Russian folk tales to identify their simplest irreducible narrative elements.- Biography :...
, the researcher into the aesthetics of theater Étienne Souriau
Étienne Souriau
Étienne Souriau was a French philosopher, best known for his work in aesthetics.He studied at the École Normale Supérieure and received his agrégation of philosophy in 1925. After teaching at the universities of Aix-en-provence and Lyon he eventually became a professor at the Sorbonne, where he...
, the phenomenologists Edmund Husserl
Edmund Husserl
Edmund Gustav Albrecht Husserl was a philosopher and mathematician and the founder of the 20th century philosophical school of phenomenology. He broke with the positivist orientation of the science and philosophy of his day, yet he elaborated critiques of historicism and of psychologism in logic...
and Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Maurice Merleau-Ponty was a French phenomenological philosopher, strongly influenced by Karl Marx, Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger in addition to being closely associated with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir...
, the psychoanalyst
Psychoanalysis
Psychoanalysis is a psychological theory developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud. Psychoanalysis has expanded, been criticized and developed in different directions, mostly by some of Freud's former students, such as Alfred Adler and Carl Gustav...
Gaston Bachelard
Gaston Bachelard
Gaston Bachelard was a French philosopher. He made contributions in the fields of poetics and the philosophy of science. To the latter he introduced the concepts of epistemological obstacle and epistemological break...
, and the novelist and art historian André Malraux
André Malraux
André Malraux DSO was a French adventurer, award-winning author, and statesman. Having traveled extensively in Indochina and China, Malraux was noted especially for his novel entitled La Condition Humaine , which won the Prix Goncourt...
.
Semiotics
Greimas headed semiotic-linguistic research, laying the foundations for the Paris School of Semiotics. Among Greimas's major contributions to semiotics are the concepts of the Semiotic SquareSemiotic square
The Semiotic Square, also known as the Greimas Square, is a tool used in the structural analysis of the relationships between semiotic signs. The Semiotic Square was developed by Algirdas J. Greimas, a Lithuanian linguist and semiotician and first presented in Semantique Structurale This book was...
, isotopy
Isotopy (semiotics)
In a story, we detect an isotopy when there is a repetition of a basic meaning trait ; such repetition, establishing some level of familiarity within the story, allows for a uniform reading/interpretation of it. An example of a sentence containing an isotopy is I drink some water...
, the actantial model
Actantial model
In structural semantics, the actantial model, also called the actantial narrative schema, is a tool used to analyze the action that takes place in a story, whether real or fictional...
, the narrative program, and the semiotics of the natural world. He was influential in semiotic literary criticism
Semiotic literary criticism
Semiotic literary criticism, also called literary semiotics, is the approach to literary criticism informed by the theory of signs or semiotics...
.
Mythology
He later began researching and reconstructing Lithuanian mythologyLithuanian mythology
Lithuanian mythology is an example of Baltic mythology, developed by Lithuanians throughout the centuries.-History of scholarship:Surviving information about Baltic paganism in general is very sketchy and incomplete. As with most ancient Indo-European cultures Lithuanian mythology is an example of...
. He based his work on the methods of Vladimir Propp
Vladimir Propp
Vladimir Yakovlevich Propp was a Russian and Soviet formalist scholar who analyzed the basic plot components of Russian folk tales to identify their simplest irreducible narrative elements.- Biography :...
, Georges Dumézil
Georges Dumézil
Georges Dumézil was a French comparative philologist best known for his analysis of sovereignty and power in Proto-Indo-European religion and society...
, Claude Lévi-Strauss
Claude Lévi-Strauss
Claude Lévi-Strauss was a French anthropologist and ethnologist, and has been called, along with James George Frazer, the "father of modern anthropology"....
, and Marcel Detienne
Marcel Detienne
Marcel Detienne is a Belgian historian and specialist in the study of ancient Greece. He is Professor Emeritus at The Johns Hopkins University, where he held the Basil L...
. He published the results in Apie dievus ir žmones: lietuvių mitologijos studijos (Of Gods and Men: Studies in Lithuanian Mythology) 1979, and Tautos atminties beieškant (In Search of National Memory) 1990. He also wrote on Proto-Indo-European religion
Proto-Indo-European religion
Proto-Indo-European religion is the hypothesized religion of the Proto-Indo-European peoples based on the existence of similarities among the deities, religious practices and mythologies of the Indo-European peoples. Reconstruction of the hypotheses below is based on linguistic evidence using the...
.
English bibliography
- [1966] Structural Semantics: An Attempt at a Method. trans. Daniele McDowell, Ronald Schleifer, and Alan Velie. Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1983.
- [1970] On Meaning. trans. Frank Collins and Paul Perron. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.
- [1976] Maupassant: The Semiotics of Text. trans. Paul Perron. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: J. Benjamins, 1988.
- [1976] The Social Sciences. A Semiotic View. trans. Frank Collins and Paul Perron. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989.
- [1979] — with Joseph Courtés, Semiotics and Language: An Analytical Dictionary. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982.
- [1985] Of Gods and Men: Studies in Lithuanian Mythology. trans. Milda Newman. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992.
- [1991] — with Jacques FontanilleJacques FontanilleJacques Fontanille is a French semiotician who is one of the main exponents of the Paris School of Semiotics. He has authored or co-authored ten books and a number of articles or book chapters whose topics span theoretical semiotics, literary semiotics, and semiotics of the visual...
, The Semiotics of Passions: From States of Affairs to States of Feelings. trans. Paul Perron and Frank Collins. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993.