"Linguistica sum; linguistici nihil a me alienum esse puto" (I am a linguist; I find nothing about language foreign to me). These words of Terence, aptly and famously paraphrased by Roman Jakobson, succinctly characterize Jakobson in every aspect of...

Roman Jakobson's essay "Linguistics and Poetics" has had a longer run than most other twentieth-century works of literary theory (Jakobson 1981). (1) Its diagram linking addresser and addressee continues to be drawn on university blackboards every year. Its specification of the "poetic function"...

Jean Jacques Weber, ed. London and New York: Arnold, 1996. vi + 312 pp. $49.95 cloth; $19.95 paper. This reader, like all anthologies, "constructs a version of history" (7). Two key questions which suggest themselves when reviewing any version of the history...