Structuralism
•In sociology, anthropology, linguistics and literature structuralism is the theory
that advocates that elements of human culture must be understood in terms of
their relationship to a larger, overarching system or structure.
•It works to uncover the structures that underlie all the things that humans do,
think, perceive, and feel.
•Philosopher Simon Blackburn says that structuralism is "the belief that
phenomena of human life are not intelligible except through their interrelations.
These relations constitute a structure, and behind local variations in the surface
phenomena there are constant laws of abstract culture“.
•Structuralism in Europe developed in the early 1900s, in the structural linguistics
of Ferdinand de Saussure and the subsequent Prague, Moscow and Copenhagen
schools of linguistics. In the late 1950s and early '60s, when structural linguistics
was facing serious challenges from the likes of Noam Chomsky and thus fading in
importance, an array of scholars in the humanities borrowed Saussure's concepts
for use in their respective fields of study.
•French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss was arguably the first such scholar,
sparking a widespread interest in Structuralism.
Structuralism
•The most prominent thinkers associated with structuralism include Lévi-Strauss,
linguist Roman Jakobson, and psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. As an intellectual
movement, structuralism was initially presumed to be the heir apparent to
existentialism.
•The origins of structuralism connect with the work of Ferdinand de Saussure on
linguistics, along with the linguistics of the Prague and Moscow schools. In brief,
de Saussure's structural linguistics propounded three related concepts.
Ferdinand De Saussure (is called The Father of Modern Linguistics), a professor
at University of Geneva, Switzerland, developed structural linguistics between
1906 and 1911.
Linguistic SIGN (word) = SIGNIFIER +SIGNIFIED
SIGNIFIER (spoken sound or written symbol)
SIGNIFIED (concept signaled by signifier)
Linguistic Sign is defined by differences that distinguish if from other signs
Structuralism
Context:
As a literary theory, Structuralism is developed in the 1950s and 1960s, adopted
from theories other areas such as sociology, psychoanalysis, anthropology, etc.
**All interrelated!**
Fields of Structuralism:
Some fields in which Structuralism is applied are anthropology, sociology,
architecture, linguistics, psychology, and literature.
The most famous thinkers associated with structuralism include:
Anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss
Psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan
Philosopher and historian Michel Foucault
Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser
Literary critic Roland Barthes
Northrop Frye**
Structuralism
Saussure’s Proposition/Pronouncement about Linguistic Structure: (see the book, Beginning
Theory: page 40-43 )
In 1950s-1960s, Ferdinand De Saussure gave three pronouncements which can be summarized as
basic assumptions of Structuralism:
1. Meaning is Arbitrary
2. Meanings of words are relational
3. Meaning is always attributed to the object/idea by human mind
Major Principles of Structuralism:
4. Meaning occurs through difference and SIGNS’ relationship to each other. Ex: woman vs. lady
5. Much of our imaginative world is structured in binary sets (opposites) which assign structure
and meaning to signs. (Ex: cruel vs. humane) Forms the basis of SEMIOTICS, the study of
signs.
6. Sign = union of SIGNIFIER and SIGNIFIED. Ex: c-a-t, fuzzy critter that goes “meow”
7. CODES provide signs with context - cultural context, literary context, etc.
8. Emphasizes that humans create meaning. Structuralism, then, allows us to examine our
relationships with literature, art, society, etc.
9. Our sense of self -- our consciousness -- exists in relation to outside collective influences. We
are NOT self-contained!
10. Reality is conventional; our perceptions of the world around us are bound up in conventions,
codes, signs, etc. The “social construction of reality”.
Structuralism
Structuralism’s ultimate argument is this…
There is a connection between our concept of reality, the self, society, consciousness, and
unconsciousness. They are all connected to each other and are bound by the same laws,
signs, and conventions.
When reading a text Structuralism is looking for (Structuralist analysis of a literary text) :
•Parallels in plot
•Echoes in structure
•Reflections/repetitions in character/motive
•Contrasts in situation/circumstance
•Patterns in language/imagery
Sign:
Sign = union of SIGNIFIER and SIGNIFIED. Ex: c-a-t, fuzzy critter that goes “meow”
Saussure's 'theory of the sign' defined a sign as being made up of the matched pair of
signifier and signified.
Signifier
• The signifier is the pointing finger, the word, the sound-image.
•A word is simply a jumble of letters. The pointing finger is not the star. It is in the
interpretation of the signifier that meaning is created.
Structuralism
Signified
• The signified is the concept, the meaning, the thing indicated by the signifier. It
need not be a 'real object' but is some referent to which the signifier refers.
•The thing signified is created in the perceiver and is internal to them. Whilst we
share concepts, we do so via signifiers.
•Whilst the signifier is more stable, the signified varies between people and
contexts.
•The signified does stabilize with habit, as the signifier cues thoughts and images.
Langue and Parole:
Langue (French, meaning "language") and parole (meaning "speaking") are
linguistic terms distinguished by Ferdinand de Saussure in his Course in General
Linguistics to gave a way of thinking about the larger structures which were
relevant to literature .
Langue:
•Langue encompasses the abstract, systematic rules and conventions of a signifying
system
• It is independent of, and pre-exists, individual users.
•Langue involves the principles of language, without which no meaningful
utterance, "parole", would be possible.
Structuralism
Parole:
•Parole refers to the concrete instances of the use of langue.
• This is the individual, personal phenomenon of language (as a series of speech
acts made by a linguistic subject)
•It is the usage of the system but not the system.
•It is the actual utterance (actual manifestation of language)
•Saussure did not concern himself overly with parole rather on Langue; however,
the structure of langue is revealed through the study of parole.
•Saussure drew an analogy to chess to explain the concept of langue and parole.
He compared langue to the rules of chess—the norms for playing the game—and
compared the moves that an individual chooses to make—the individual's
preferences in playing the game—to the parole.
Structuralism in Literature
•Structuralism is used in literary theory, for example, "...if you examine the
structure of a large number of short stories to discover the underlying principles
that govern their composition...principles of narrative progression...or of
characterization...you are also engaged in structuralist activity if you describe the
structure of a single literary work to discover how its composition demonstrates
the underlying principles of a given structural system" (Tyson 197-198).
•Northrop Frye, however, takes a different approach to structuralism by exploring
ways in which genres of Western literature fall into his four mythoi (also see
Jungian criticism in the Freudian Literary Criticism resource):
1. theory of modes, or historical criticism (tragic, comic, and thematic);
2. theory of symbols, or ethical criticism (literal/descriptive, formal, mythical,
and anagogic);
3. theory of myths, or archetypal criticism (comedy, romance, tragedy,
irony/satire);
4. theory of genres, or rhetorical criticism (epos, prose, drama, lyric) (Tyson 240).
Structuralism in Literature
Overview of the characteristics of Structuralism with respect to Literature:
1.Meaning occurs through difference.
2.Relations among signs are of two types, contiguity and substitutability.
3.Our world of imaginative world is structured of and structured by binary
oppositions.
4.Structuralism forms the basis of semiotics.
5.In semiotics and structuralism the idea of codes is central.
6.According to structuralism every individual is a subject and human reality is a
construction.
7.Our reality is coded and constructed through conventions that is made up of
signs and signifying practices.
8.Structuralism relates reading a text to reading a culture.
9.It enables us to read a text historically and trans-culturally.
10.It encourages cultural, context based and genre based analysis of literary text.
Structuralism in Literature
Structuralism is more than a linguistic exercise. While structuralism historically (in Europe)
is a linguistic phenomenon, and it would seem reasonable that structuralist criticism would
then be linguistic in its nature, this is too simple an assumption.
First of all, literary language is language used to certain ends, having a certain function and
therefore featuring the qualities of linguistic production and the relationships of sounds and
meaning in a particular way. The ends then are important. As he writes on page 66,
structuralist method as such is constituted at the very moment when one rediscovers the
message in the code, uncovered by an analysis of the immanent structures and not imposed
from the outside by ideological prejudices. (Poststructuralists will deny that anything can be
innocent of ideology.)
Second, there is a homology, a structural relationship, between the way language cuts up
the world of meaning, and the way literature and literary genres do. There is an analogy
between literature and linguistics not only because they are both involved in language but
because both deal with:
•the relation between forms and meanings,
•the way reality is culturally defined by the segmentation and identification of
experience,
•the cultural perception of reality, and
•the systemic relationships of signs which underlie those cultural perceptions.
Structuralism in Literature
4: Structuralism is about meaning, not just about form. Genette is at pains to
point out that structuralism is not just about form, but about meaning, as
linguistics is about meaning. It is a study of the cultural construction or
identification of meaning according to the relations of signs that constitute the
meaning-spectrum of the culture. (67 ft) When Jakobson writes of the centrality of
tropes to imaginative writing, he places the categories of meaning at the heart of
the structural method, as tropes, including metaphor and metonymy, are the way
we say something by saying something else, figures of signification. Ambiguity,
which is a meaning-function, is at the heart of the poetic function, as we saw in #1
above. Finally in this section, Genette looks forward to structural analysis at the
more macro level of the text, of the analysis of narratives, for instance -- "an
analysis that could distinguish in them [that is, larger units], by a play of
superimpositions [and hence knowledge through difference], variabvle elements
and constant functions, and to rediscover in them the bi-axial system, familiar to
Saussureanlinguistics, of syntagmatic relations (real connections of functions in the
continuity of a text) and paradigmatic relations (virtual relations between similar or
oposed functions, form one text to another, in the whole of the corpus
considered)>"[68t]
Structuralism in Literature
•Structuralism is a general tendency of thought (Cassirer) Structuralism is,
however, not necessarily an intrinsic fact of nature but rather is a way of thinking;
[68] structures are"systems of latent relations, conceived rather than perceived,
which analysis constructs as it uncovers them, and which it runs the risk of
inventing while believing that it is discovering them" -- that is, structures are
explanations of coherence and repetition, they appear in what they seek to
explain, they in a sense provide the terms and the vehicle of explanation. as we
can only now through knowledge frames. Structuralism is the explanation of texts
or events in their own terms (as those terms are conceived), not in relation to
external causes.
•When one turns to the internal dynamic of a text as an object, a field of
meanings, and to the coherence of it as a text, rather than as biography or
sociology, one reads structurally. Structuralist reading abandons pyschological,
sociological, and such explanations. One can see New Criticism as a structural
methodology, although it is not structuralism: in structural analysis of theme, for
instance, theme would be seen in the context of the relations of themes, that is, of
certain elements of filaments of the configuration, or network or matrix of, of
social meanings, which meanings constitute culture.
Structuralism in Literature
Structuralism is however not merely intrinsic criticism, the criticism of the thing
itself. Genette mentions the other form of intrinsic criticism, phenomenological
criticism, in which one becomes in touch with the subjectivity of the creative voice
of the work. Ricoeur refers to this, Genette writes, as the hermeneutic method: the
intuitive convergence to two consciousnesses, the authors and the readers. This is
a little confusing, because this is not hermeneutics properly speaking, but rather
phenomenological hermeneutics. When there is hermeneutics, Genette says,
when the text is available to us in that immediate a way, then structural reading
fades; but whenever we have to look more objectively, when we are transversing
barriers of time, say, or of culture or interest, then the structural method, the
search for principles of order, coherence and meaning, becomes dominant --
literatures [71t] distant in place and time, children's literature, popular literature.
Genette goes on to suggest that the difference between hermeneutic and
structural reading is a matter of the critical position of the critic -- (between
identity and distance, say). Structuralism is an intrinsic reading free from
subjectivity, when we become the ethnomethodologists of our culture (71).
Structuralism in Literature
Structuralism ties the meaning of the work to the meanings of the culture. (72)
Genette suggests that topics is an area of study that structuralism can bring us to --
the traditional subjects and forms of the culture (from the Greek topos, 'place'; I
prefer to refer to culturally-constucted sites of meaning as topoi, to try to retain
the full meaning of the idea). Topics, or topoi, are structural in that they underlie
the way we talk and think about things in our culture. They are in a sense
psychological, Genette says [72], but collectively so, not individually. Throughout,
in writing of the cultural knowledge that structuralism provides, Genette has been
suggesting that 'high' literature is not the only, perhaps not the primary, location
for the study of cultural meanings: the serious study of popular culture has begun.
Structuralism opens the study of genre to new light. Different genres predispose
the reader to different attitudes, different expectations [cf. the saying, attributed to
Voltaire, that life is a comedy to he who thinks and a tragedy to he who feels,
which saying suggests a way in which genres might look differently at experience].
Different genres lead to different expectations of types of situations and actions,
and of psychological, moral, and esthetic values. Without conventional
expectations we cannot have the difference, the surprise, the reversals which mark
the more brilliant exercise of creativity. Hence creativity is in a sense structural, as
it depends on our expectation, which it them plays upon.
Structuralism in Literature
Structuralism can be applied to the study of literature as a whole, as a meaning
system. Structurally, literature is a whole; it functions as a system of meaning and
reference no matter how many works there are, two or two thousand. Thus any
work becomes the parole, the individual articulation, of a cultural langue, or
system of signification. As literature is a system, no work of literature is an
autonomous whole; similarly, literature itself is not autonomous but is part of the
larger structures of signification of the culture.
Structuralism studies literature synchronically, but with diachronic awareness.
Structuralism studies literature historically by studying it as it were in cross-section
at different times, by seeing in what way literature divides up the traditional topics
of the cultural imagination. Change is intrinsic to literature, as the Russian
formalists thought; what the change registers is the alterations of the relations of
meaning within the culture. Structuralism can then yield a fruitful approach to the
history of literature, not as a series of great works, or of influences of one writer
upon another, but more structurally, more systematically, as the way in which a
culture's discourse with itself alters. The meaning of an individual work is
ultimately and inevitably only the meaning within a larger frame of cultural
meanings, and these meanings change in relation to one another across time and
cultures.
Structuralism in Literature
CODE & BARTHES
CODE: CODES provide signs with context - cultural context, literary context, etc.
Barthes’ five “codes” ( see Promod K.Nayar’s Contemporary Literary Theory)
Barthes identifies five codes which he says provide the underlying narrative
structures for all literature.
When reading, attempt to place a work in the system of codes. The Codes are:
Proairetic - provides indications of actions; “reality”. Ex: The ship sailed at noon.
Hermeneutic - poses questions or enigmas that provide narrative suspense and
involve the reader. Ex: if the narration indicates a knock on the door, the reader
asks herself, “Who is it?”
3. Cultural - contains references beyond the text which are considered common
knowledge (allusions, metonymy). Ex: if a character is described as driving a hybrid
car, there are certain cultural assumptions attached to that character.
4. Semic - linked to a theme on the character level, when a series of signs and
ideas surround an individual.
5. Symbolic - linked to theme on a larger level. Consists of contrasts and pairings
related to the most basic binary polarities - man/woman, good/evil,
lost/recovered, etc. **
Structuralism in Literature
What do the structuralists ask (about a literary piece)?
What are the elements of the work – words, stanzas, chapters, parts, for example –
and how can these be seen as revealing “difference”?
How do the characters, narrators, speakers, or other voices heard in the work
reveal difference?
How do the elements of the work’s plot or overall action suggest a meaningful
pattern? What changes, adjustments, transformations, shifts of tone, attitude,
behavior, or feeling do you find?
How are the work’s primary images and events related to one another? What
elements of differentiation exist, and what do they signify?
What system of relations could be used to link this work with others of its kind?
What system of relations could be used to link this work with others of its kind?
What system of relations could be used to link this work with different kinds of
things with which it shared some similarities?
