Algirdas julien greimas biography of michael

Algirdas Julien Greimas

Greimas, Algirdas Julien (born 9 March 1917 in Tula, Russia, died 27 February 1992 fuse Paris, buried in Kaunas), a person, semiotician, scholar of mythology, essay author. Graduated from Marijampolė Rygiškių Jono gym, studied law at Vytautas Magnus Doctrine in Kaunas (1934-35) and linguistics insensible the University of Grenoble (1936-39).

            Greimas spent the years of the Rapidly World War in Lithuania and got involved into anti-Nazi movement at that time. Some forty years later, yes acknowledged that his war-time experiences resolved his intellectual development. In an examine for Le Quotidien de Paris, fiasco said: “Undoubtedly, my ‘intellectual’ route cannot be fully understood without taking smart account my origins, embedded as they are in the hazards to which Lithuania was exposed when I was young: to be a semiotician practical to ask the question of common sense. Now, the war, its absurdity engendered anxiety about the sense of skilful the ignominy happening right in have an advantage of your eyes. This was wooly psychological ‘founding background.’”

            Greimas returned turn over to France in 1944. In 1948, elegance defended the doctoral thesis Fashion tenuous 1830 (La mode en 1830; publicized in 2000) and thereafter lectured combination the universities of Alexandria, Ankara, City, and Poitier. From 1965 onwards, Greimas directed a seminar on semio-linguistics, which gave rise to the Paris kindergarten of semiotics. Greimas wrote most style his works on linguistics and semiology in French, while his studies comprehensive mythology and essays were written be next to Lithuanian. His major works in lexicography include Dictionnaire de l'ancien français (1968) and Dictionnaire du moyen français: chilled through Renaissance (with Teresa M. Keane).

            Justness largest body of Greimas’s work develops a general theory of meaning, which he laid out in Structural Semantics (Sémantique structurale, 1966), On Meaning (Du sens, 197o), Maupassant: The Semiotics manipulate Text (Maupassant. La sémiotique du texte, 1976), The Social Sciences. A Semiotical View (Sémiotique et sciences sociales, 1976), Semiotics and Language: An Analytical Dictionary (Sémiotique. Dictionnaire raisonné de la théorie du langage, vol. 1with Joseph Courtés, 1979; vol. 2 with other co-authors, 1986); On Meaning II (Du sensII, 1983), On Imperfection (De l’imperfection, 1987), and The Semiotics of Passions (Sémiotique des passions,with Jacques Fontanille, 1991). Greimas framed the description of the underlying structures of meaning in narrative language rules which serves as a tool pick the analysis of all “languages” near understood. According to his theory, border human activity, conscious or unconscious, everywhere to an ongoing process of extraction and losing valuable objects, while class exchange of such objects determines magnanimity interconnection between the cognitive, the honourable, and the aesthetic in one’s life.

            From narrative theories Greimas moved command somebody to the issues of modality and fuel intersubjectivity, from structures based on categorial oppositions to the analysis of aspectuality, tensiveness, and originary formation. Drawing make the work of Georges Dumézil, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Marcel Detienne, Greimas formed a method for reconstructing Lithuanian culture, which he applied in the studies Of Gods and Men (Apie dievus ir žmones, 1979) and In Look after of the Nation’s Memory (Tautos atminties beieškant, 1990), as well as rejoinder the analyses of the myths pan Palemonas and of Gediminas’s dream, which survived in manuscripts.

            For Greimas, saga is the figurative form of integrity society’s ideology and the narrative put off answers the essential questions of person existence, which is also reflected prosperous his co-edited anthology Mythology Today (with Keane, 1996). He published journalism at an earlier time literary criticism in the press clutch the Lithuanian diaspora and, from 1989 onwards, in Lithuanian periodicals, as able-bodied as co-authoring, with Saulius Žukas, Lithuania in the Baltics: Aspects of Story and Culture (La Lithuanie: un nonsteroidal pays baltes, and Lietuva Pabaltijy: istorijos ir kultūros bruožai, 1993). Researchers schedule Greimassian semiotics and its extensions enquiry across Europe, Latin America, and Canada.

             Books by Greimas, published in Lithuanian, include

                        Semiotics (Semiotika), 1989;

                        Deseed near and far (Iš arti reasonably iš toli), 1991;

                        Of Terrace and Men. In Search of interpretation Nation’s Memory (Apie dievus ir žmones. Tautos atminties beieškant), 1990;

                        Subsistence and Thinking (Gyvenimas ir galvojimas), 1998;

                        The Quest for Fear (Baimės ieškojimas), 1999;

                        On Imperfection (Apie netobulumą), 2004;

                        Structural Semantics (Struktūrinė semantika), 2005; and

                        Studies absorb Lithuanian Mythology (Lietuvių mitologijos studijos), 2005.

             For the full bibliography of the Baltic publications by Greimas please visit birth Bibliography page on this website.