Structure, Sign and Function- Selected Essays by Jan Mukarovsky (Yale University Press)

Published by Yale University Press, 1977, hardcover, 269 pages, no dust jacket otherwise condition: as new.

Jan Mukařovský  was a Czech literary, linguistic, and aesthetic theorist.

Mukařovský was professor at the Charles University of Prague. He is well known for his association with early structuralism as well as with the Prague Linguistic Circle, and for his development of the ideas of Russian formalism. Among other achievements, he applied ideas from Geneva linguist and semiotician Ferdinand de Saussure to the analysis of literary and artistic expression, systematically applying and extending the concept of linguistic function to literary works and their reception in different periods. Mukařovský had a profound influence on structuralist theory of literature, comparable to that of Roman Jakobson.

Structuralism is an intellectual current and methodological approach, primarily in the social sciences, that interprets elements of human culture by way of their relationship to a broader system. It works to uncover the structural patterns that underlie all the things that humans do, think, perceive, and feel. Alternatively, as summarized by philosopher Simon Blackburn, structuralism is

"The belief that phenomena of human life are not intelligible except through their interrelations. These relations constitute a structure, and behind local variations in the surface phenomena there are constant laws of abstract structure."