About Algirdas Greimas
Algirdas Julien Greimas was a Lithuanian literary scientist who wrote most of his body of work in French while living in France. Greimas is known among other things for the Greimas square. He is, along with Roland Barthes, considered the most prominent of the French semioticians. With his training in structural linguistics, he added to the theory of signification, plastic semiotics, and laid the foundations for the Parisian school of semiotics. Among Greimas's major contributions to semiotics are the concepts of isotopy, the actantial model, the narrative program, and the semiotics of the natural world. He also researched Lithuanian mythology and Proto-Indo-European religion, and was influential in semiotic literary criticism. Greimas became an avid reader of Marx. Greimas became an anti-Communist but retained a lifelong affinity with Marxist, leftist, and liberal ideas. In 1942, in Kaunas, Greimas became active in the underground Lithuanian Freedom Fighters Union, which derived from the Lithuanian Nationalist Party, which the Nazis had banned in December 1941.
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