Beata Stawarska, "Saussure’s Linguistics, Structuralism, and Phenomenology: 'The Course in General Linguistics' after a Century (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020)
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What is Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics and why is it being revisited?
Hi everyone, this is Marshall Poe. I'm the founder of the New Books Network, and I'm also a historian. I used to be a history professor, and I love maps, so I'm especially happy to tell you that this episode is sponsored by What's Your Map, which was the winner of the Best Education Podcast at the 2025 British Podcast Awards. What's Your Map is hosted by historian and prize-winning author Professor Jerry Broughton. In each episode, he invites a guest to share a map close to their heart and unfurl the ideas, inspirations, and stories behind it. I can tell you I've listened and it's fascinating. The podcast is in its sixth series and is enjoyed by audiences around the globe. You can explore all the maps in the podcast online.
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Hello and welcome to New Books and Philosophy, a podcast channel with the New Books Network. I'm Sarah Tyson, Associate Professor of Philosophy in the University of Colorado, Denver. And I'm co-host of the channel, along with Carrie Figdor, Robert Talese, and Alexis McLeod. Together, we bring you conversations with philosophers about their new books, drawing from a wide range of areas of contemporary philosophical inquiry. Today's interview is with Beata Stowarska, professor of philosophy at the University of Oregon. Her book, Saussure's Linguistics, Structuralism, and Phenomenology, The Course in General Linguistics After a Century, is just out from Palgrave Macmillan. In the book, Stowarska guides us to consider Ferdinand de Saussure's Course in General Linguistics anew.
By delving into Saussure's autograph notes, letters, and student lecture notes, Stowarska reframes all of the hierarchical pairs promoted as part of Saussure's doctrine, the signifier and the signified, the langue and la parole, synchrony and diachrony. The book performs reading and writing without borders that it also argues Saussure thought necessary to think about language. Along the way, it questions sedimented ideas about structuralism, poststructuralism, phenomenology, and the object of linguistics, which is to say language. Beata, welcome to New Books and Philosophy. Hi, Sarah. Thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure to have you today. Will you tell us a little bit about yourself and your background as a philosopher and how you came to write this book?
Sure. So I was always interested, just broadly speaking, in the humanities, in literature, in languages, in the arts. And I had a chance to study philosophy. Initially, I thought it would just be one year abroad kind of thing. I went to Belgium to study philosophy at the University of Leuven or Louvain. And I was hooked very quickly. I became very passionate about the field. I thought that I finally discovered my vocation. I could have been an art historian, I could have been a linguist before, but once I was exposed to philosophy, I knew that it was it. I was educated, broadly speaking, especially in contemporary European philosophy with an emphasis on phenomenology, Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, and Jean-Paul Sartre as well.
Since I received my PhD, I have been deliberately expanding my horizons to include feminists philosophy to include deconstruction as well. And I would say that my inclination is always to work at the borders of philosophy and non-philosophy. So, for example, in my first book, which came out in 2009, Between You and I, Biological Phenomenology, I drew on contributions from developmental psychology, from sociolinguistics, as well as from the dialogical tradition and philosophy, especially Martin Buber, to develop this notion of what I call in the book, I and you connectedness.
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Chapters
6 chapters
1
What is Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics and why is it being revisited?
0:00–10:16
2
Who is Beata Stawarska and what is the main argument of her new book?
10:16–23:31
3
How did Beata’s academic background shape her interest in Saussure’s work?
23:31–35:48
4
How were Saussure’s original notes turned into the canonical “Course in General Linguistics”?
35:48–46:45
5
How does Derrida read Saussure in *Of Grammatology* and what does he claim?
46:45–56:44
6
What are the concepts of entrainment and contamination in Saussurean linguistics?
56:44–1:01:09
Speakers
3 identifiedMore from New Books in Philosophy
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