The word and verbal art

by Jan Mukařovský

The core of the book is an intelligent summary of various studies of literary forms done by the French critics of the last several decades, in particular, by Barthes, Greimas, Genette and Todorov. This is accompanied by a compact discussion of Russian formalism, one more bird's eye view on the Saussure-Jakobson tradition in linguistics, and the author's own contribution to the poetics of fiction : the topics for which Scholes has a special predilection and on which he has published a number of important essays. His critical summaries of structuralist critics are models of clarity.