Structuralism Literary Theory
Structuralism is a way of understanding culture and meaning in the arts by relating the individual piece
of art (a novel, a painting, a symphony) to something larger. In Structuralist theory, the relationship
between cultural phenomena is a web, network, or structure, which exists underneath the way we think
and act, and produce art.
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English Literature
Literary Criticism and Theory
Structuralism Literary Theory
Structuralism Literary Theory
Structuralism is a way of understanding culture and meaning in the arts by relating the individual piece
of art (a novel, a painting, a symphony) to something larger. In Structuralist theory, the relationship
between cultural phenomena is a web, network, or structure, which exists underneath the way we think
and act, and produce art.
Structuralism Literary Theory
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American Drama
American Literary Movements
American Literature
American Poetry
American Regionalism Literature
American Short Fiction
Dramatists
Essayists
Literary Criticism and Theory
Aristotle
Bell Hooks
Critical Race Theory
Cultural Studies
Deconstruction
Derrick Bell
Disability Theory
Eco-Criticism
Edward Said
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
F. R. Leavis
Feminist Literary Criticism
Ferdinand Saussure
Formalism Literary Theory
Fredric Jameson
Freudian Criticism
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
Harold Bloom
Helene Cixous
Homi Bhabha
Intersectionality
Jacques Derrida
Jacques Lacan
James Wood
Jean Baudrillard
Jean-Francois Lyotard
Julia Kristeva
Kimberle Crenshaw
Luce Irigaray
Marxism Literary Criticism
Mikhail Bakhtin
Narratology
New Historicism
Patricia J. Williams
Post-Structuralism
Postcolonial Literary Theory
Postmodern Literary Theory
Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism
Queer Theory
Raymond Williams
Reader Response Criticism
Roland Barthes
Roman Jakobson
Rosemarie Garland Thomson
Stephen Greenblatt
Structuralism Literary Theory
Terry Eagleton
Walter Benjamin
Walter Pater
Literary Devices
Literary Elements
Literary Movements
Literary Studies
Non-Fiction Authors
Novelists
Poets
Contents
Table of contents
Structuralism is used in philosophy, history, anthropology, and literary theory.
Structuralism literary theory: writers
Structuralism comes from a branch of language study called ‘structural linguistics’. This approach was
originally developed by a French linguist called Ferdinand de Saussure.
Saussure developed an approach to the study of language which saw the linguistic sign (a word) as the
relationship between a ‘sound image’ (a spoken word or written word), which he called a ‘signifier’, and
the concept itself, which he called the ‘signified’. This differed from earlier ways of understanding the
relationship between words and things. Until Saussure, words and the things they denoted were
thought to have a direct relationship.
The word 'tree' denoted a physical tree in the real world. So the word ‘tree’ meant ‘an actual, physical
tree’. Saussure realised that this is not how language works. Instead, the word/sound ‘tree’ represents a
mental image (or concept) of a tree rather than a real tree. This is because language (and the concepts it
uses) is a property of the mind. As such, language allows us to understand and interpret the world
through a system of signs (words+concept).
Rene Magritte illustrated this in his painting This is Not a Pipe (1929), ‘Ceci n’est pas une pipe’. The point
Magritte is making is that a painting of a pipe is not really a pipe. It is a representation of a pipe only. In a
similar way, a pipe (like the one in the painting ) exists in the mind when we use the word ‘pipe’. When
we hear the word ‘pipe’ we imagine a pipe. The pipe is a mental image of a real pipe.
After Saussure’s work, others took up the idea in their own fields, most notably Claude Levi-Strauss,
another Frenchman, in the field of anthropology. Other important names in Structuralism include Emile
Durkheim in sociology and Jacques Lacan in psychoanalysis. Structuralism became more and more
important and influential in the 1960s. Why did it become so popular? Partly because it seemed to offer
one approach which could be applied universally across academic disciplines. After World War Two and
the rise of Nazism, a unifying approach was an attractive idea.
Structuralism literary theory and criticism
Because linguistics and literary theory are closely related, the ideas proposed in linguistics by Saussure
were easily adapted to the study of literature. When a literary text is studied using Structuralism, the
text is connected to a wider ‘structure’. This might include the kind of literature the text is part of (its
genre), or the universal ways stories are told around the world.
In this case, the structuralist mines the text for certain common themes or patterns. The idea here is
that human consciousness has universal features, and it is the job of the literary critic to find them and
explain them. Any literary text can be reduced to its basic parts. Once that is done, the text can be
compared to other stories with a similar narrative structure.
For example, ‘Boy meets girl. Girl finds herself in danger of some kind. Boy rescues girl’. This is a
common story in books and films. No matter what style of writing this narrative structure is found in (an
epic poem, a novel, a play), the basic parts of the story are the same. It’s a classic
hero+tension+resolution kind of story.
So a novel or a poem, or a painting, gives information about something much deeper (the underlying
structure of consciousness).
Structuralists believe that the underlying structures which organise rules and units into meaningful
systems are generated by the human mind itself and not by sense perception.¹
This means that our minds manage information so that it becomes meaningful. It is the mind itself which
makes meaning out of the world around us.
Structuralism literary theory examples
Structuralism uses some basic questions to interpret literary texts:
1. Are there any patterns in text A which are similar to patterns in text B? Structuralism is
interested in similarities between texts.
2. Are there any opposites in the text which are set against each other? In Structuralism, opposites
are called ‘binary oppositions’, such as good/evil, light/dark, tall/short etc.
In his book Literary Theory (1983), Terry Eagleton says that Structuralism represents a ‘remorseless
demystification of literature’.² This means that when Structuralism is applied to a literary text, it strips
the text of its aesthetic form and subjective meaning and reduces it to its bare essentials. All that is left
is the underlying structure.
Eagleton writes:
… the literary work, like any other product of language, is a construct, whose mechanisms could be
classified and analysed like the objects of any other science.2
As such, Structuralism is explicitly anti-individual and to a certain extent, anti-artist. It is not interested in
individuality or artistic creativity in and of itself, nor as a unique manifestation of an author’s
personality. It is only interested in the underlying and shared structures of consciousness found in the
work of art or literature. It is a unifying approach. But as it unifies, it also obliterates. This idea is found
in a famous essay by Roland Barthes called ‘The Death of the Author’ (1977).
Take a popular example: Romeo and Juliet (published in 1597). The story is beautifully written, of
course. The language is memorable, and productions are put on all over the world. But stripped down to
its bare essentials, the story is simple: ‘Boy meets girl. They fall in love. They kill themselves.’ There is
also a parallel plot: ‘a conflict between two families’. The two levels of the plot are interrelated and
affect each other during the course of the play. The Prologue Provides the ‘structure’ of the whole:
Two households, both alike in dignity, In fair Verona, where we lay our scene, From ancient grudge
break to new mutiny, Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean. From forth the fatal loins of these
two foes A pair of star-cross’d lovers take their life; Whose misadventured piteous overthrows Do with
their death bury their parents’ strife. The fearful passage of their death-mark’d love, And the
continuance of their parents’ rage, Which, but their children’s end, nought could remove, Is now the
two hours’ traffic of our stage; The which if you with patient ears attend, What here shall miss, our toil
shall strive to mend.
A structuralist interpretation focuses on the overall plot and the binary oppositions in the play. In
Romeo and Juliet, the main binary opposition is love/hate; it is found throughout the play in the
opposition between Romeo and Juliet’s love for each other, compared to the hatred that the two
families have for each other.
Main characteristics of Structuralism literary theory
The main characteristics of Structuralism in literary theory are as follows:
1. A focus on the underlying structure of a literary text.
2. The meaning of a text is in the inter-relationship of its parts.
3. Binary oppositions are key to understanding a text.
4. The individuality and personality of the author are unimportant. What matters are the deep
structures.
5. Literary texts are constructs. Meaning does not come from inside the text. Instead, meaning
comes from the relationship of each part of the text with other parts.