ABSTRACT
Although many of the perspectives and methods that have come to be held as fundamental to Communication Studies had currency and status in mainland Europe for much of the first half of the twentieth century it was only in the late 1960s that these ideas made the successful journey to the United Kingdom and the USA. Given the absorption of many of the principles and practices of semiotics (as evidenced by Guiraud, Barthes, and Barley [which appear as Extracts 8, 9, and 10 in this book]) into contemporary experiences of everyday life and representations it’s now quite difficult to imagine the impact that texts such as Peter Wollen’s Signs and Meanings in the Cinema had when it was first published in 1969. Not only were the ideas of semiotics and structuralism taken up by communications professionals but they were also taken up by the academic world. In some cases the revolutionary impact of these perspectives was too much for the Academy. David Lodge sets his 1988 novel Nice Work in the world of the late 1980s’ British university system. As background to the material practices of key characters in the novel, Lodge brilliantly sketches the scene at Cambridge University in the late 1970s/early 1980s before making barely disguised reference to the sacking of Colin MacCabe from his Cambridge University teaching post on account of his promoting ‘new’ ideas such as structuralism:
Intellectually it was an exciting time to be a research student in the English Faculty. New ideas imported from Paris by the more adventurous young teachers glittered like dustmotes in the Fenland air: structuralism and poststructuralism, semiotics and deconstruction, new mutations and graftings of psychoanlaysis and Marxism, linguistics and literary criticism. The more conservative dons viewed these ideas and their proponents with alarm, seeing in them a threat to the traditional values and methods of literary scholarship. Battle was joined, in seminars, lectures, committee meetings and the review pages of scholarly journals. It was a revolution. It was civil war. … Then in 1981 all hell broke loose in the Cambridge English Faculty. An extremely public row about the denial of tenure to a young lecturer associated with the progressive party opened old wounds and inflicted new ones on this already thin-skinned community. … For a few weeks the controversy featured in the national and even international press, up-market newspapers carrying spicy stories about the leading protagonists and confused attempts to explain the difference between structuralism and poststructuralism to the man on the Clapham omnibus.
(Lodge 1988: 46–8)