Cats in space Baudelaire's “les chats” read by Jakobson and Lévi-Strauss

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Abstract

Jakobson was an exceptional reader of poetry, and yet not what the world would call a literary critic ²

Cf. Roman Jakobson, Question de poétique, edited by Tzvetan Todorov, Ed. du Seuil, Paris 1973.

. He often co-authored analyses of poetry, and his formal approach aimed at something as objective as any other fact of language he analysed; this cooperative, objective, and formal attitude had to attract the structural anthropologist Levi-Strauss' intellectual attention, and as much in the scientifically glorious years around 1960, when “‘Les chats’ de Charles Baudelaire” was written in collaboration, as it had done on the methodological level, back in 1942, at the École libre des Hautes Études de New York. ³

Claude Lévi-Strauss later prefaced Roman Jakobsons early New York course, Six leçons sur le son et le sens, Ed. de Minuit, Paris 1976.

Notes

Cf. Roman Jakobson, Question de poétique, edited by Tzvetan Todorov, Ed. du Seuil, Paris 1973.

Claude Lévi-Strauss later prefaced Roman Jakobsons early New York course, Six leçons sur le son et le sens, Ed. de Minuit, Paris 1976.