Structuralism Literary Theory
Structuralism in literary theory focuses on analyzing literature by examining the underlying structures and systems that shape the text. It emphasizes the interconnectedness of elements within a literary work and seeks to uncover the underlying patterns and codes that govern its meaning. Structuralist literary theory often explores the relationship between language and culture, and how these factors influence the production and interpretation of literature.
8 Key excerpts on "Structuralism Literary Theory"
eBook - ePubCritical Theory Today
A User-Friendly Guide
- Lois Tyson(Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...So there seems to be a rather powerful parallel between literature as a field of study and structuralism as a method of analysis. Our discussion of structuralist approaches to literature will focus on the narrative dimension of literary texts because structuralist criticism deals mainly with narrative. This focus is not as narrow as it may seem at first glance, however, if we remember that narrative includes a long history and broad range of texts, from the simple myths and folk tales of the ancient oral tradition to the complex mélange of written forms found in the postmodern novel. In addition, most drama and a good deal of poetry, though not classified as narrative, nevertheless have a narrative dimension in that they tell a story of some sort. In any event, as we’ll see, narratives provide fertile ground for structuralist criticism because, despite their range of forms, narratives share certain structural features, such as plot, setting, and character. We must keep in mind, however, that structuralism does not attempt to interpret what individual texts mean or even whether or not a given text is good literature. Issues of interpretation and literary quality are in the domain of surface phenomena, the domain of parole. Structuralism seeks instead the langue of literary texts, the structure that allows texts to make meaning, often referred to as a grammar because it governs the rules by which fundamental literary elements are identified (for example, the hero, the damsel in distress, and the villain) and combined (for example, the hero tries to save the damsel in distress from the villain). In short, structuralism isn’t interested in what a text means, but in how a text means what it means...
eBook - ePub- Raman Selden, Peter Widdowson, Peter Brooker(Authors)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Chapter 4 Structuralism N ew ideas often provoke baffled and anti-intellectual reactions, and this was especially true of the reception accorded the theories which go under the name of ‘structuralism’. Structuralist approaches to literature challenged some of the most cherished beliefs of the ordinary reader. The literary work, it was long felt, is the child of an author’s creative life, and expresses the author’s essential self. The text is the place where we enter into a spiritual or humanistic communion with an author’s thoughts and feelings. Another fundamental assumption which readers often make is that a good book tells the truth about human life – that novels and plays try to ‘tell things as they really are’. However, structuralists have tried to persuade us that the author is ‘dead’ and that literary discourse has no truth function. In a review of a book by Jonathan Culler, John Bayley spoke for the anti-structuralists when he declared, ‘but the sin of semiotics is to attempt to destroy our sense of truth in fiction … In a good story, truth precedes fiction and remains separable from it.’ In a 1968 essay, Roland Barthes put the structuralist view very powerfully, and argued that writers only have the power to mix already existing writings, to reassemble or redeploy them; writers cannot use writing to ‘express’ themselves, but only to draw upon that immense dictionary of language and culture which is ‘always already written’ (to use a favourite Barthesian phrase). It would not be misleading to use the term ‘anti-humanism’ to describe the spirit of structuralism...
eBook - ePub- David Carter(Author)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- Pocket Essentials(Publisher)
...Structuralism Structuralism challenged many of the most cherished beliefs of both critics and readers: the assumption that a literary work expresses an author’s mind and personality and that it also tells some essential truth about human life. Structuralists state bluntly that the author is dead and that literary discourse has no truth function. In an essay of 1968, the French theorist Roland Barthes put the structuralist view in perhaps its most forceful form. He claimed that writers only have the power to mix already existing writings, to reassemble them.They cannot use writing to express themselves but can only draw on language, which is already formulated, and culture, which is essentially already expressed in language (in Barthes’ words it is ‘always already written’). Structuralists also describe themselves as anti-humanist because they oppose all forms of literary criticism in which the meaning is related to a human subject. Of course, if all these tenets were demonstrably true, then writers might as well cast aside their pens and reach for their knitting needles. Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913) Concepts formulated by one man have greatly influenced the whole of modern literary theory. He is included here among the structuralists because that is where his influence is particularly strong but the whole of cultural theory is permeated by distinctions first drawn up by him. If there is some truth in the claim that the whole of western philosophy is but a series of footnotes to Plato, then the same could be said of the relationship between cultural (hence also literary) theory and Ferdinand de Saussure. Important for structuralist theory is his distinction between ‘langue’ and ‘parole’. ‘Langue’ is the language system which we all share and which we unconsciously draw on when we speak; ‘parole’ is language as we actually realize it in individual utterances. For Saussure, the proper study for linguistics is the underlying system and not the individual utterances...
eBook - ePubMarxism/Structuralism/Education (RLE Edu L)
Theoretical Developments in the Sociology of Education
- Madan Sarup(Author)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Chapter 4 Structuralism, Literature and Cultural Studies In the first part of this book I looked at some aspects of marxism; in this part the focus will be on structuralism, those theories based on the pioneering work of Saussure on language. Saussurean structural linguistics first provided the methodological impetus to treat other systems of phenomena as ‘languages’. Since the Second World War French structuralism has had an extraordinary impact on social and political thought. Though structuralism constitutes not a unified theory, but a complex network of writings interacting in various ways, there is one core feature: its rejection of the ego. Not only does structural analysis abandon the search for external causes, it refuses to make the thinking subject an explanatory cause. The work of Lévi-Strauss, Barthes, Lacan, and Foucault (along with the texts of Saussure, Freud and Nietzsche which they use) has called into question the notion of the self as subject or consciousness which might serve as a source of meaning and a principle of explanation. In other words, the researches of psychoanalysis, of linguistics, of anthropology have ‘decentred the subject’ in relation to the laws of its desire, the forms of its language, the rules of its actions. The dominant tradition has taken the self as a conscious subject. But once meaning is explained in terms of systems which may escape the grasp of the conscious subject, the self can no longer be identified with consciousness. And as it is displaced from its function as centre or source, the self comes to appear more and more as a construct. Structuralism Structuralism is a method whose scope includes all human phenomena, embracing not only the social sciences (anthropology, sociology, psychology, politics, economics) but also the humanities (literature, history, linguistics) and the fine arts...
eBook - ePubAn Introduction to Criticism
Literature - Film - Culture
- Michael Ryan(Author)
- 2011(Publication Date)
- Wiley-Blackwell(Publisher)
...They are names for things. We ignore the fact that words are sounds and mental images in a complex machine or system called language. Like the chain on a chainsaw that works because of the machine attached to it, words work because of the machinery of the language system that is attached to every one of them. Structuralist Linguistics is concerned with this dual nature of language. Language is impersonal and shared (like the rules of chess), but it is also a field of infinite variation linked to the actual use of the language. The consequences of Structuralism for literary and cultural criticism have been profound. Thinkers have been especially attracted by the Structuralist idea that language is a self-enclosed semiotic system. They linked that idea to cultural institutions and practices such as advertising and journalism. We know the world through signs, and signs can be used to manipulate how we know the world. The Structuralists also were concerned with how discourse (see Chapter 1 above) plays a role in knowledge. A discourse provides tools for knowing the world by allowing things to be named in a certain way that makes sense. A discourse also, however, establishes rules for what counts as good knowledge, and it excludes other kinds of knowledge. For many decades in the US literary academy, for example, the New Critics were dominant, and their discourse was one that favored complex symbolic poetry over other kinds of literature. Their discourse excluded or diminished the importance of writing by women and non-Whites because such writing did not match the New Critical norm or standard. It was often historical, sociological, sentimental, and political. It was not about universal truths. That dominant discourse has since been challenged and changed...
eBook - ePub- Gregory Castle(Author)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Wiley-Blackwell(Publisher)
...It emerged in the 1960s during the peak period of structuralism and effectively supplanted it with an emphasis on TEXTUALITY as the means by which individuals come to know their experience of and their being in the world. As a response and a critique to structuralism, poststructuralist theorists are indebted not only to Saussure’s groundbreaking insights into the structure of language but also to Claude Lévi-Strauss’s use of them in the analysis of cultural practices and myths. Drawing on Saussure as well as on the formalism of Roman Jakobson, Lévi-Strauss argued, in Structural Anthropology (1958), that elements of culture, like kinship systems, rituals, myths, even common practices like food preparation, could be understood according to structures analogous to those found in language. Moreover, these structures could account for similarities among cultures widely separated geographically. In a sense, structural anthropology confirmed what Freud had theorized in psychoanalytic terms: that some features of human culture, like the prohibition against incest, were not only universal but could be understood and analyzed using a single method. The idea that culture could be studied as coherent and stable signifying systems and that these systems operated in a similar fashion in diverse societies had a galvanizing effect on Barthes, whose Mythologies (1957) analyzed aspects of everyday life – like laundry detergent, magazine covers, fashion, and sports – according to their structural dynamics. For him, “mythology” was everywhere in culture, functioning as a “second order” language (i.e., a metalanguage) that transformed the signifying power of objects, images, and everyday language. Another key area in which structuralism made inroads was the study of narrative...
eBook - ePubOrality and Literacy
30th Anniversary Edition
- Walter J. Ong(Author)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Textual studies, so far as I know, have never exploited the implications here (Ong 1977, pp. 22–34). The implications are massive. Semiotic structuralism and deconstructionism generally take no cognizance at all of the various ways that texts can relate to their oral substratum. They specialize in texts marked by the late typographic point of view developed in the Age of Romanticism, on the verge of the electronic age (1844 marked Morse’s successful demonstration of the telegraph). STRUCTURALISM Structuralist analysis as developed by Claude Lévi-Strauss (1970; Hawkes 1977, pp. 32–58) has focused largely on oral narrative and has achieved a certain freedom from chirographic and typographic bias by breaking down oral narrative in abstract binary terms rather than in terms of the sort of plot developed in written narrative. Lévi-Strauss’s fundamental analogue for narrative is language itself with its system of contrastive elements: phoneme, morpheme, etc. He and his many followers generally have paid little if any attention to the specific psychodynamics of oral expression as worked out by Parry, Lord, and particularly Havelock and Peabody. Attention to such work would add another dimension to Structuralist analysis, which is often accused of being overly abstract and tendentious – all structures discerned turn out to be binary (we live in the age of the computer), and binarism is achieved by passing over elements, often crucial elements, that do not fit binary patterning. Moreover, the binary structures, however interesting the abstract patterns they form, seem not to explain the psychological urgency of a narrative and thus they fail to account for why the story is a story. Studies of orality as such have brought out that oral narrative is not always put together in terms which admit of ready Structuralist binary analysis, or even of the rigid thematic analysis which Propp (1968) applies to the folktale...
eBook - ePub- Sara Upstone(Author)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Teach Yourself(Publisher)
...If, however, we were to do this to the sentence: • The mat sat on the cat. we can see how the syntagmatic axis is very important. In literary analysis, we may come across ordering of words that appears unusual: in new critical terms the syntagmatic axis is one device that allows us to distinguish literary language from the everyday. As critics, we can examine the syntagmatic axis to consider how an author has manipulated word ordering to affect meaning. In the same way, we can look at the paradigmatic axis: • The cat sat on the mat. • The cat sat on the rug. Structuralism asks us to consider why one word is favoured over another. The change can be quite profound (for example, if here we had substituted mat with dog) or, as in this case, it can be subtle. In literature, these subtle differences have particular significance: what concept, we can ask, is carried by a particular signifier and what does it do to shape the overall meaning of a sentence, and indeed an entire work? Spotlight Even structuralism has its Romantic side. In Mythologies (1957), Roland Barthes writes, ‘Take a bunch of roses; I use it to signify my passion. Do we have here, then, only a signifier and a signified, the roses and my passion?…But on the plane of analysis, we do have three terms; for these roses weighted with passion perfectly and correctly allow themselves to be decomposed into roses and passion: the former and the latter existed before uniting and forming this third object, which is the sign.’ In the 1950s and 1960s Saussure’s ideas were taken up by a number of critics, including Lévi-Strauss, Jakobson and Barthes. It is at this point that semiology becomes structuralism. Rooted in semiology’s ideas, structuralism – as the name implies – concerns itself with the underlying structures of language. Echoing formalism, structuralism sees no place for the author in literary studies...
