Exiled in the United States during the Second World War, linguist Roman Jakobson gave a series of lectures at the École Libre des Hautes Études in New York. These classes – attended among others by Claude Lévi-Strauss – had a major impact on contemporary human sciences. This book reconstructs and analyzes this momentous corpus. It also contains a critical edition of four previously unpublished lectures given by Jakobson in 1942–1943.