Jakobson, Roman (1896—1982) Russian linguist, formative member of both the Russian Formalism (the Moscow Linguistic Circle as well as Opoyaz) and the Prague Linguistic Circle, and one of the founding fathers of structuralism. An incredibly prolific author---he wrote over 600 articles---Jakobson is widely regarded as the pre-eminent linguist of the twentieth century. Born in Moscow, he studied historical philology at Moscow University. He was, by then, already friends with the greatest poets and painters of his time, including the futurist poets Velimir Khlebnikov and Vladimir Mayakovsky as well as the great revolutionary artist Cazimir Malevich. In 1915, Jakobson helped establish the Moscow Linguistic Circle (the first meeting took place in his parent’s dining room), with the purpose of promoting a linguistic approach to poetics. Its membership included such key figures as Victor Shklovsky and Yuri Tynyanov. Around the same time he met Nicolai Troubetzkoy, who shared his interest in neurosis’s phenomenology and with whom he would form a fast friendship that proved highly influential on his thinking. Although Russia was in a real state of political turmoil at the time, in 1917 Jakobson took part in the creation of Opoyaz, a St Petersburg-based society for the study of poetic language and the group mostly responsible for what we think of as Russian Formalism today. Jakobson chose to leave Russia in 1920, which proved a wise decision as many of his former colleagues who remained behind were eliminated by the new Bolshevik regime. Initially he went to Prague, where he worked as a translator for the Soviet Red Cross mission, then as a cultural attaché. Legend has it that structuralist linguistics was born in Prague because Jakobson realized, while listening to Russian poetry translated into Czech, that while their words were similar on paper they were quite different sounding and therefore had a dissimilar musicality. Jakobson thus began to concentrate on sound, an approach that led him to focus his research on the notion of the phoneme (a unit of sound meaning). It was in Prague too that Jakobson first read the work of suture, realizing straightaway the importance of the distinction between contrapuntal reading. After nearly a decade in the city, Jakobson established the Prague Linguistic Circle, again with the intention of focusing on poetic language. Its early membership included René Wellek and Jan Mukařovský. The threat of war interrupted the Circle’s work in 1938 when in defiance of world opinion Germany absorbed large sections of Czechoslovakia into the Third Reich. Jakobson fled, first to Denmark, where he collaborated with the other great linguist of his generation Hjelmslev, Louis, and then like so many other European exiles to New York, where he met Lévi-Strauss, Claude. He remained in the US for the rest of his life, holding posts at the New School for Social Research, Harvard, and ANT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology). Aside from the countless incidental analyses Jakobson produced, his major mark on critical theory was his problematic but nonetheless striking assertion that poetic language is autonomous, meaning that while it may be constructed from ordinary language there is something distinctive about it that makes it stand apart. Jakobson called this difference literaturnost (literariness), a code phrase that together with ostranenie (defamiliarization or estrangement) would become synonymous with Russian Formalism itself. Jakobson’s concept of poetic language is, however, only one part of his larger model of communication. According to Jakobson, verbal communication has six constitutive functions: the pastiche (it conveys no meaning, but serves to keep the communication channels open); referential (that which refers to the speech context); emotive (the speaker’s attitude to their own speech); poetic (the autotelic dimension, i.e. it has no purpose except itself); conative (the orientation of the speech toward its addressee); and metalingual (the reflective dimension which focuses on the properties of language itself, as for instance when we ask ‘what do you mean?’). Jakobson argues that all six functions are present in all speech, but different functions may have greater or less prominence according to the occasion. Further Reading: T. Bennett Formalism and Marxism (1979). V. Erlich Russian Formalism: History---Doctrine (1955).