170 Glossary of Names
existentialism; the latter was used to describe and immortalize Jean Genet,
the poet and thief, as a kind of martyr of radical social action.
Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913) Swiss linguist and father of semiology
whose published lecture notes, Cours de linguistique générale (1916),
have had enormous influence on French literature, literary and cultural
criticism, social science and philosophy. his main innovation was to
consider language and meaning as synchronic (rather than diachronic, or
purely etymological). made up of a signifer and a signified, which are linked
in an arbitrary (unmotivated) way, the sign is at the heart of language;
humans communicate by choosing from a stock of words and syntactic
rules (langue) which they use and combine with other words and rules to
form speech acts (parole). Barthes used Saussure’s distinctions to forward
his analysis of clothing and fashion forms, transposing the semiological
distinctions in the Saussurian account of language and its operations to the
world of clothing.
Marie (‘Madame’) de Sévigné (1626–1696) one of the most influential
female French writers, famous for her literary and socially minded
correspondence. Controversial and contemporary, this collection of letters
is a window both on to private life and courtly society.
Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) British sociologist who believed that life was
governed by laws and that these laws could be used to set up a theory of
social evolution.
Jean Stoetzel (1910–1987) French sociologist and director of the Revue
française de sociologie, whose work specialized in public opinion, religion
and social psychology.
Knud Togeby (1918–1974) Danish linguist of the Copenhagen circle and
scholar of the saga, specializing in tenses; his study of the French
language, Structure immanente de la langue française (nordisk Sprog og
Kulturforlag, 1951), was influential at the time.
Nikolai Sergeevich Trubetskoy (1890–1938) russian phonologist and
morphologist, translated by roman Jakobson.
Wilhelm Max Wundt (1832–1920) Early German psychologist, of the
voluntarist school, who put forward the idea of humans’ ‘heterogony of
ends’ which suggested that an individual does not have tunnel vision when
pursuing a goal, and therefore is highly unpredictable.
Emile Zola (1840–1902) Influential French novelist and critic, famous also
for his stance in favour of the falsely accused Jewish (traitor) of France,
alfred Dreyfus. his novels are renowned for their naturalist, reform-minded
portrayal of social conditions in late nineteenth-century France, in which
poverty, alienation and commodity fetishism feature as fundamental human
ills; his 1883 novel Au bonheur des dames looked at the effect of the
department store display—especially fashion—on popular consciousness.