A revolution in language
Subtitle: the problem of signs in late eighteenth-century France
By: Sophia Rosenfeld.
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2001
Place of publication: Stanford, Calif
Language: eng
Number of pages: 410
Subjects: Semiotics -- France -- History -- 18th century
Description: "What is the relationship between the ideas of the Enlightenment and the culture and ideology of the French Revolution? This book takes up that classic question by concentrating on changing conceptions of language and, especially, signs during the second half of the eighteenth century.".

"The author traces, first, the emergence of a new interest in the possibility of gestural communication within the philosophy, theater, and pedagogy of the last decades of the Old Regime. She then explores the varied uses and significance of a variety of semiotic experiments, including the development of a sign language for the deaf, within the language politics of the Revolution.".

"A Revolution in Language shows not only that many key revolutionary thinkers were unusually preoccupied by questions of language, but also that prevailing assumptions about words and other signs profoundly shaped revolutionaries' efforts to imagine and to institute an ideal polity between 1789 and the start of the new century. This book reveals the links between Enlightenment epistemology and the development of modern French political culture."--BOOK JACKET.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [345]-397) and index.
Table of contents: title: Machine generated contents note: Introduction; title: i. The Gestural Origins of Semiosis and Society:; title: An Enlightenment Solution, 1745-60; title: 2. Pantomime as Theater, 1760-89; title: 3. Pantomime as Pedagogy, 1760-89; title: 4. Revolutionary Regeneration and the Politics of; title: Signs, 1789-94; title: 5. Ending the Logomachy, 1795-99; title: Conclusion: The Savage, the Citizen, and the; title: Language of the Law after 1800; title: Notes; title: Bibliography; title: Index.