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“... in its modern phase – from the moment when it achieved new importance in the work of Lévi-Strauss in the early Sixties, through its development and extensions in the work of Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida, to its present position, which is known either as ‘post-structuralism’ or simply as ...”

“... but now America’s ‘red states’ vote Republican while its ‘blue states’ vote Democrat. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Edmund Leach, Mary Douglas and Marshall Sahlins have pointed out that our normative ‘totemic’ systems of colour – urban gang colours, sports team colours, school colours, gender colours etc – are precisely analogous to those of ...”

“... started by the Free French and Belgians. One of his first New York friends was a fellow teacher, Claude Lévi-Strauss: the two of them went to one another’s lectures. Listening to Jakobson’s still revolutionary ideas on phonology made Lévi-Strauss realise for the first time that he himself was a ...”

“... and Robert Byron. The scholarly version of these explorations is called anthropology, as in Claude Lévi-Strauss, Clifford Geertz, Margaret Mead, and many American scholars in receipt of sabbatical leave and Guggenheim fellowships. If you have a sufficiently resourceful mind, and a persuasive style, of course, you can stimulate them by going for a ...”

“... not just as an abstract value but as a prerequisite for intellectual and aesthetic originality. Claude Lévi-Strauss, who defended premodern societies against accusations of backwardness, would have endorsed his view that ‘each phase of historical development has had its end in itself, and hence its own reward and satisfaction.’ Most ...”

“... was teaching at the University of São Paulo in Brazil in 1935 alongside the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss and the Italian poet Giuseppe Ungaretti, he had been told of the decline of Europe. ‘We should no doubt have smiled disbelievingly.’How could cultures as vibrant as Baroque Italy or interwar Europe have been so radically ...”

“... in a collective life crystallised into a cognitive frame which had moral force. Forty years later, Claude Lévi-Strauss turned this argument around. If sentiments played any part at all, he asserted, it was as the consequence and not the cause of cognition. Cognition is its own explanation. It has an irreducible and invariant ‘structure’ which shapes ...”

“... us consider the names given to horses – not ordinary horses . . . but racehorses,’ writes Claude Lévi-Strauss, opening an excursus on equine onomastics in The Savage Mind. The names of thoroughbreds are ‘rigorously individualised’ and ‘rarely, if ever, describe them’. What counts is the way they can be seen to derive from the horse’s ...”

“... only close to modernist artists but also crucial to the subsequent development of structuralism by Claude Lévi-Strauss and others (Lévi-Strauss, alas, didn’t share their modernist commitments). In effect Bois used Russian Formalism to break the hold of the American variety; it also launched him on a central line of ...”

“... and idle gossip, and badly needed transforming into an objective system. At around the same time, Claude Lévi-Strauss was hatching much the same ambitions for anthropology. In Frye’s view, criticism’s task was to seek out the objective laws by which an apparently random assemblage of literary texts secretly operated, and these laws were to be found ...”

“... of human societies that make for the cultural universals urged by anthropologists as different as Claude Lévi-Strauss and Mary Douglas. Cultures – a word that has long been overused, and which I try to avoid – are entities that exist because children are nurtured into systems of practices and reactions that define the collective lives of ...”

“... ease of a novel. Again, the range is imposing – Raymond Queneau, Roland Barthes, E.M. Cioran, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Bruno Bettelheim, Peter Gay’s Art and Act, The New Oxford Book of Christian Verse – the casual erudition much in evidence. Updike is a master at summing up careers: from the letters of Kafka, Joyce, Flaubert and Hemingway he ...”

“... off. In all three books, Derrida’s argument was that Western thought from Plato to Rousseau to Lévi-Strauss had been hopelessly entangled in the illusion that language might provide us with access to a reality beyond language, beyond metaphor: an unmediated experience of truth and being which he called ‘presence’. Even Heidegger, a radical critic of ...”

“... better book than her historicist claim leads us to expect; like another closet universalist, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Warner establishes principles that apply far beyond her stated subject. Oddly, or not so oddly, it is Freudians, rather than Jungians, who attract her anti-archetypal fire. ‘An archetype is a hollow thing, but a dangerous one, a ...”

“... a story – powerful cults, saturated with negativity – they might not behave themselves. As Claude Lévi-Strauss understood, every version of a myth, however distant or apparently contradictory, belongs to the myth; every retelling is owned by the story, not by the teller. Freud’s Oedipus isn’t just Freud talking about Oedipus, but one more ...”