31 mai 2023
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Chloé Laplantine, « Edward Sapir: form-feeling in language, culture, and poetry », HAL-SHS : linguistique, ID : 10.1007/978-3-031-17913-6_6
This chapter attempts to shed light on Edward Sapir’s conception of form-feeling, by situating his approach to language and culture in the Boasian anthropological tradition, and focusing on the considerations on culture and on poetry he developed around the 1920s. Franz Boas’s anthropology attempted to describe North American languages and cultures on their own terms, seeking to apprehend languages as they were felt by their speakers and not as objective phenomena; as is well known, his approach challenged traditional cultural and linguistic categories. Grammars in the Boasian tradition tried to account for the experience of the speakers by an analysis of the language. Sapir’s linguistic notion of form-feeling can be understood in this context. We try to show here that Sapir’s reflection on form in language, culture, and poetry always strove to foreground the role and liberate the potentiality of the individual in the formation of culture: crucially, he opposed “form” as “inner striving” and “formalism” as “outer obstacle.”