Structural
ism
Sunchon National University
Department of English Education
Education of theories of British and
American literature
Usarov Khayotbek
Structuralist chickens and
liberal humanist eggs
Structuralism is an intellectual
movement which began in
France in the 1950s and is first
seen in the work of the
anthropologist Claude Levi-
Strauss (1908—) and the
literary critic Roland Barthes
(1915-1980).
Structuralism was imported into Britain
mainly in the 1970s
and attained widespread influence, and
even notoriety, throughout the 1980s.
Donne's poem the
relevant
genre is the alba or
'dawn song'
For
structuralists, determining the
precise nature of the chicken is
the most important activity, while
for the liberal humanists the close
analysis of the egg is paramount.
in the structuralist approach to
literature there is a constant
movement away from the
interpretation of the individual
literary work and a parallel drive
towards understanding the
larger, abstract structures which
contain them
Though structuralism
proper began, as we
said, in the 1950s and
1960s, it has its roots
Signs of the in the
thinking of the Swiss
fathers -
linguist Ferdinand de
Saussure Saussure (1857-
1913). Saussure was
a key figure in
the development of
modern approaches
to language study
But what exactly did
Saussure say about
linguistic structures
which the structuralists
later found so
interesting? This can be
summarised as three
pronouncements in
particular. Firstly, he
emphasised that the
meanings we give to
words are purely
arbitrary, and that
these meanings
are maintained by
Saussure emphasised that the meanings
of words are (what we might call)
relational. That is to say, no word can be
defined in isolation from other words.
The definition of any given word
02
depends upon its relation with other
'adjoining' words. For example, that
word 'hut‘ depends for its precise
meaning on its position in a
'paradigmatic chain', that is, a chain of
words related in function and meaning
each of which could be substituted for
any of the others in a given sentence
This 'relational' aspect of language
02
gave rise to a famous remark of
Saussure's: 'In a language there are
only differences, without fixed
terms'. All words, then, exist in
'differencing networks', like these
'dyads',or paired opposites, and
like the paradigmatic chain of
'dwelling place' words given
earlier.
Thirdly, for Saussure, language
constitutes our world, it doesn't just
record it or label
Meaning is always attributed to the
object or idea by the human mind, and
it.
03
constructed by and expressed through
language: it is not already contained
within the thing. Well-known examples
of this process would be the choice
between paired alternatives like
'terrorist' or 'freedom
fighter'.
Poll tax
The government itself called the tax the
community charge, avoiding the
negative word 'tax' and making use of the
favoured term 'community'.
So Saussure's thinking stressed the
way language is arbitrary,
relational, and constitutive, and this
way of thinking about language
greatly influenced the
structuralists, because it gave them a
model of a system which is self-
contained, in which
individual items relate to other items
and thus create larger structures
The scope of structuralism
For the structuralist, the culture we are
part of can be 'read' like a language, using
these principles, since culture is made up
of many structural networks
which carry significance and can be
shown to operate in a systematic way.
These networks operate
through 'codes' as a system of signs; they
can make statements, just as language
does, and they can be read
or decoded by the structuralist or
semiotician.
Roland Barthes, who applied the
structuralist method to the general
field of modern culture. He
examined modern France (of the
1950s) from the standpoint of a
cultural anthropologist in a
little book called Mythologies which
he published in France in 1957
What structuralist critics do
1. They analyse (mainly) prose narratives,
relating the text to some larger containing
structure, such as:
(a) the conventions of a particular literary
genre, or
(b) a network of intertextual connections,
or
(c) a projected model of an underlying
universal narrative structure, or
(d) a notion of narrative as a complex of
recurrent patterns or motifs.
What structuralist critics do
2. They interpret literature in terms of a
range of underlying parallels with the
structures of language, as described by
modern linguistics. For instance, the notion
of the 'mytheme', posited by Levi-Strauss,
denoting the minimal units of narrative
'sense', is formed on the analogy of the
morpheme, which, in linguistics, is the
smallest unit of grammatical sense. An
example of a morpheme is the 'ed' added
to a verb
to denote the past tense.
What structuralist critics do
3. They apply the concept of
systematic patterning and structuring
to the whole field of Western culture,
and across cultures, treating as
'systems of signs' anything from
Ancient Greek myths to brands of
soap
powder.
.
Structuralist criticism: examples
The five codes identified by Barthes in S/Z are:
1. The proairetic code This code provides indications of actions.
('The ship sailed at midnight' 'They began again', etc.)
2. The hermeneutic code This code poses questions or enigmas
which provide narrative suspense. (For instance, the sentence 'He
knocked on a certain door in the neighbourhood of Pell Street'
makes the reader wonder who lived there, what kind of
neighbourhood it was, and so on).
3. The cultural code This code contains references out beyond the
text to what is regarded as common knowledge. (For example, the
sentence 'Agent Angelis was the kind of man who sometimes
arrives at work in odd socks' evokes a preexisting image in the
reader's mind of the kind of man this is - a stereotype of bungling
incompetence, perhaps, contrasting that with the image of brisk
efficiency contained in the notion of an 'agent'.) and art, and so on
Structuralist criticism: examples
4. The semic code This is also called the connotative code. It is
linked to theme, and this code (says
Scholes in the book mentioned above) when organised around
a particular proper name constitutes a
'character'. Its operation is demonstrated in the second
example, below.
5. The symbolic code This code is also linked to theme, but on a
larger scale, so to speak. It consists of
contrasts and pairings related to the most basic binary
polarities - male and female, night and day, good
and evil, life and art, and so on. These are the structures of
contrasted elements which structuralists see as
fundamental to the human way of perceiving and organising
reality
Difference between liberal humanist
and structuralist
The most basic difference between liberal humanist and structuralist reading is that the
structuralist's comments on structure, symbol, and design, become paramount, and
are the main focus of the commentary, while the emphasis on any wider moral
significance, and indeed on interpretation itself in the broad sense
2. Instead of going straight into the content, in the liberal humanist manner, the
structuralist presents a series of parallels, echoes, reflections, patterns, and contrasts,
so that the narrative becomes highly schematised, is translated, in fact, into what we
might call a verbal diagram
Thank you for
attention!