ABSTRACT
The history of structuralism cannot be thought without Ferdinand de Saussure (18571913). The Swiss linguist lecturing in Geneva in the early twentieth century set the scene for what in the two and a half decades following the Second World War came to be known as structuralism. The figures who dominated the development of the movement in the 1940s and 1950s were Claude Lévi-Strauss (b. 1908), Jacques Lacan (1901-82), and Roland Barthes (1915-80). By the 1960s Michel Foucault’s (1926-84) reformulations and even rejections of structuralism indicated the new directions for what became poststructuralism.
