Criticism > Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism > Sapir, Edward - Regna Darnell (essay date 1986)

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Regna Darnell (essay date 1986)

SOURCE: “The Emergence of Edward Sapir's Mature Thought,” in New Perspectives in Language, Culture, and Personality, William Cowan, Michael K. Foster, Konrad Koerner, eds., John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1986, pp. 553-88.

[In the following essay, Darnell discusses Sapir's wide range of theoretical interests.]

INTRODUCTION

Edward Sapir was interested, in a more than passing way, in Germanic philology, American Indian linguistics, ethnology and folklore, poetry, literary criticism, music, mathematics, psychology and psychiatry, and theoretical linguistics. The question remains, however, which, if any, is the “real” Edward Sapir. Scholars in a range of present-day disciplines and subdisciplines acknowledge him as a founding father; most are only minimally aware of his contributions in areas which, for them, are unrelated. I would like to suggest that the whole of Edward Sapir best emerges...

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1. Introduction
2. Principal Works
3. Criticism
   1. Edward Sapir (essay date 1921)
   2. Richard Handler (essay date 1983)
   3. J. David Sapir (essay date 1984)
   4. Regna Darnell (essay date 1986)
   5. Richard Handler (essay date 1989)
   6. Robert McMillan (essay date 1996)
   7. Lars Rodseth (essay date 1998)
4. Further Reading
5. Copyright