The Sense of Form in Literature and Language demonstrates how form in language participates in and determines the meaning of literary texts. This entails seeing verse and prose as a structure, of which the building blocks are primarily linguistic; and taking the form of these building blocks to be part of the content. The Sense of Form in Literature and Language continues the general line of research Michael Shapiro has pioneered, and exemplifies what a Peircean approach can contribute to the cognitive study of language and literature, and to the exploration of the semiotic nature of verbal creativity. Shapiro analyzes representative texts and examples from Russian, English, Romance, Japanese, and Ancient Greek literature. The analyses of verse and of prose fiction are unified by treating language as the only sure repository of meaning. This insightful work offers a wide range of examples from many genres and traditions and a unified approach to literature and language deriving in part from a reliance on the semiotic perspective of Peirce's whole philosophy.
Michael Shapiro was born in Yokohama in 1939 and grew up speaking Russian, Japanese, and English. He spent the war years in Japan before immigrating to Los Angeles with his parents in 1952. Through his father, Constantine Shapiro (1896-1992), he is a direct descendant of the founder of the yeshiva system of Jewish education, Hayyim of Volozhin (the "Volozhiner rebbe" [1749-1821]), and the last in a line of scholars that includes three eminent Russian-Jewish philologists: Viktor Zhirmunsky (1891-1971), Yury Tynianov (1894-1943), and Yakov Malkiel (1914-1998). In 1965-66 he was a postdoctoral fellow in linguistics at Tokyo University and spent the next forty years in the United States as a university professor of Slavic and semiotic studies. He is the co-author, with his late wife Marianne Shapiro, of Figuration in Verbal Art (1988) and The Sense of Form in Literature and Language (2nd ed., 2009). His 2007 book, Palimpsest of Consciousness, is a commentary on his only work of fiction, My Wife the Metaphysician, or Lady Murasaki's Revenge.
Michael Shapiro is a member of the Society of Senior Scholars at Columbia University. His website is at www.marianneandmichaelshapiro.com.
