• In literary theory structuralism is an approach to analyzing the narrative material by examining
the underlying structure. For example, a literary critic applying a structuralist literary theory
might say that the authors of the West Side Story did not write anything "really" new, because
their work has the same structure as Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. In both texts a girl and a
boy fall in love (a "formula" with a symbolic operator between them would be "Boy +LOVE Girl")
despite the fact that they belong to two groups that hate each other ("Boy's Group -LOVE Girl's
Group") and conflict is resolved by their death. The versatility of structuralism is such that a
literary critic could make the same claim about a story of two friendly families ("Boy's Family
+LOVE Girl's Family") that arrange a marriage between their children despite the fact that the
children hate each other ("Boy -LOVE Girl") and then the children commit suicide to escape the
arranged marriage; the justification is that the second story's structure is an 'inversion' of the
first story's structure: the relationship between the values of love and the two pairs of parties
involved have been reversed. Structuralistic literary criticism argues that the "novelty value of a
literary text" can lie only in new structure, rather than in the specifics of character development
and voice in which that structure is expressed.
• Structuralism was pioneered by Ferdinand de Saussure.
Structuralism originated in the structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure and the subsequent Prague
and Moscow schools of linguistics. Just as structural linguistics was facing serious challenges from the
likes of Noam Chomsky and thus fading in importance in linguistics, structuralism appeared in academia
in the second half of the 20th century and grew to become one of the most popular approaches in
academic fields concerned with the analysis of language, culture, and society.
The structuralist mode of reasoning has been applied in a diverse range of fields, including anthropology,
sociology, psychology, literary criticism, and architecture.
The most prominent thinkers associated with structuralism include the linguist Roman Jakobson, the
anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, the philosopher and historian
Michel Foucault, the philosopher and social commentator Jacques Derrida, and the literary critic Roland
Barthes.
• STRUCTURALIST CRITICISM: Because structuralist critics assume that human’s structure
(or make sense of) reality by imposing patterns of meaning on it, and because they
assume that these structures can only be interpreted in terms of the codes the
structures embody, they believe that writers will inevitably rely on such codes to create
meaning, that texts will inevitably embody such codes, and that audiences will inevitably
use such codes to interpret texts. To understand a text, the critic must be familiar with
the systematic codes that shape it; he must master the system(s) the text implies.