Re: Collected Works of LSV

vera p john-steiner (vygotsky who-is-at unm.edu)
Thu, 7 May 1998 10:04:00 -0600 (MDT)

Peter,
Mind in Society, we thought was going to be the second, and possibly last
book to be distributed widely in the USA of Vygotsky's works. So our
choices were very much governed by that perception. Thankfully, we were
wrong. MnS opened the door, and the Collected Volumes are a great
expansion of
what we keep on learning. I have just started to spend some time with
Vol.3. It is fascinating,
Vera

On Tue, 5 May 1998, Peter Smagorinsky wrote:

> Just to build a bit on Stanton's response to Nate: Vol. 4 of the collected
> works includes a lot of what's in Mind in Society. The translations are
> different, as are the organizations. Mike and Vera could probably tell us
> much more about their thinking behind the collection provided in Mind in
> Society, which to me coheres extremely well for a set of papers that were
> not originally written as a package; the new collection, which aims to be
> more comprehensive, appears to be trying to be more faithful to Vygotsky's
> original chronology for writing them, rather than providing modern readers
> with a collection of introductory foundational essays. Or at least that's
> what I understand to be the purpose of Mind in Society--did I get that right?
>
> So far the collected works have not included a new version of the
> Psychology of Art, which is now out of press (originally Harvard UP).
> Something else to look forward to.
>
> Peter
>
> At 01:40 PM 5/5/98 -0400, you wrote:
> >In reply to Nate's question:
> >
> >I'm sure there are others on this list who know better than I the
> >content's of Plenum's COLLECTED WORKDS OF LSV. But from my experience it
> >looks as if they do contain everything or nearly everything -- at least,
> >they contain an awful lot that English-speaking folks have had no access
> >to. The English Volume 3 (Russian Volume 1), for instance, contains
> >Vygotsky's prefaces to many classic psychological books (Kohler, etc.),
> >which are extraordinary for their philosophical incisiveness.
> >
> >As to your question about THINKING & SPEECH (apparently the more accurate
> >translation of what was called in English THOUGHT & LANGUAGE), a new
> >translation does appear in the first English volume of the COLLECTED
> >WORKS, I think, which must now be about 10 years old. MIND IN SOCIETY is
> >of course a collection of essays, and I would imagine that all these
> >appear somewhere in the COLLECTED WORKS, but probably not together.
> >
> >Stanton Wortham
> >
>

---------------------------------
Vera P. John-Steiner
Department of Linguistics
Humanities Bldg. 526
University of New Mexico
Albuquerque, NM 87131
(505) 277-6353 or 277-4324
Internet: vygotsky who-is-at unm.edu
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