An accessible collection of theoretical works by one of the most important and versatile linguists of the century...The works collected in this volume...speak eloquently.
   --Olga T. Yokoyama, Russian Review

Roman Jakobson has given us a marvelous gift: he has given linguistics to artists. It is he who opened up the live and sensitive juncture between one of the most exact of the sciences of man and the creative world. He represents, both for his theoretical thought and for his actual accomplishments, the meeting, of scientific thought and the creative spirit.
   --Roland Barthes

An anthology which unquestionably offers the best of Jakobson...even a brief perusal of the volume under review should persuade anyone that in terns I of trenchancy, precision, versatility and cultural range, Jakobson's oeuvre is without rival in the modern age. He has been the central, if as yet unacknowledged. figure in the development of modern poetics; it is time for us to come to terms with his formidable legacy.
   --F. W. Galan, Times Literary Supplement

Part of the fascination of Language in Literature is that it shows Jakobson returning again and again to the same topics, and sometimes even to the same texts, over a period of sixty years, and placing them in ever larger contexts...Jakobson's youthful ties to the Russian Futurists, and particularly to Velimir Khlebnikov, surely helped to strengthen his conviction that the critic's role is to formulate explicitly, and to demonstrate by means of a rigorous analysis the truths that the poet discovers intuitively.
   --Thomas R. Hart, Comparative Literature

Twenty-nine articles in all, written over a period of sixty years, although the represent only a fraction of Jakobson's output, provide scarcely-needed con firmation of the extraordinary and sustained depth and breadth of his erudition and interests.
   --David Shepherd, Modern Language Review

Roman Jakobson (1896-1982) was at the time of his death Professor Emeritus at Harvard University and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Linda Waugh is Professor of Linguistics, Romance Studies, and Comparative Literature, Cornell University.

Monique Monville-Burston is Associate Professor, Department of French, University of Melbourne.

Read More by Roman Jakobson:

• Language in Literature