structuralism in literary theory essay

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In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section Structuralism

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Structuralism by Sean Homer LAST REVIEWED: 26 July 2017 LAST MODIFIED: 26 July 2017 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780190221911-0019

Structuralism is a peculiarly French phenomenon. Emerging from debates primarily within French epistemology (the theory of knowledge) in the 1950s, it came to dominate the Parisian intellectual scene of the mid-1960s and the Anglo-American academy of the 1970s. The phenomenon is closely tied to the rise of the social sciences and the critique of the traditional humanities, especially philology and philosophy. Structuralism is not a philosophy as such but a mode of thinking and analysis applicable to a wide diversity of disciplines, from linguistics, psychology, and anthropology to literature, psychoanalysis, and political economy. While the disparate group of thinkers who are now placed under the rubric “structuralist,” including the psychologist Jean Piaget (b. 1896–d. 1980), the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss (b. 1908–d. 2009), the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan (b. 1901–d. 1981), the Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser (b. 1918–d. 1990), and the literary critic and semiotician Roland Barthes (b. 1915–d. 1980), do not form a coherent group, they do share a common problématique (see Bachelard 2012 [cited under Epistemic Structuralism: Marxism ]) that characterizes the structuralist project as a whole: the priority of structure over agency, a profound anti-humanism, the preeminence of scientific knowledge over empirical experience, anti-historicism, and, finally, a radical reconceptualization of the human subject. Structuralism is first and foremost a method of analysis that is seen to be applicable to all human social phenomena, namely the social and human sciences as well as the humanities and arts.

General Overviews

Many of the general introductions to structuralism date from the 1970s when the methodology first made an impact within the Anglo-American academy. These works still constitute some of the most accessible introductions. This section is subdivided into Single Author Studies , which develop a specific perspective on the subject, and Edited Collections , which introduce key authors and debates.

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Ai, ethics & human agency, collaboration, information literacy, writing process, structuralist criticism.

• © 2023 by Angela Eward-Mangione - Hillsborough Community College

Structuralist Criticism is

• a research method , a type of textual research , that literary critics use to interpret texts
• a genre of discourse employed by literary critics used to share the results of their interpretive efforts.

Key Terms: Dialectic ; Hermeneutics ; Semiotics ; Text & Intertextuality ; Tone

Structuralism enjoyed popularity in the 1950s and 1960s in both European and American literary theory and criticism. Structuralism focuses on literature as a system of signs in which meaning is constructed within a context. Cultural communities determine the meanings and relationships of signs. Criticism that uses a structuralist approach analyzes patterns, narrative operations, and/or codes of operation to interpret the text and the culture from which it emerges, exploring underlying structures that make the creation of meaning possible.

The popular structuralist critic Terence Hawkes defines structuralism as a way of thinking about the world which is predominantly concerned with the description of structures (17). Structuralism focuses on literature as a system of signs in which meaning is constructed within a context. Words inscribed with meaning may be compared to other words and structures to determine their meaning. Unlike Formalist critics or New Critics, structuralist critics are primarily interested in the codes, signs, and rules that govern social and cultural practices, including communication.

Structuralism first developed in Anthropology (Claude Lévi-Strauss), in literary and cultural studies (Roman Jakobson, Roland Barthes, and Gérard Genette), psychoanalysis, and intellectual history (Culler 17). Structuralism enjoyed popularity in the 1950s and 1960s in both European and American literary theory and criticism.

The seminal text of structuralism is Ferdinand de Saussure’s published collection of lecture notes, Course in General Linguistics (1915). These notes present a structuralist approach to language that focuses on an abstract system of signs. Two parts constitute a sign: the signifier (a spoken mark) and the signified (a concept):

Sign = Signifier

   Signified

For example, when someone says the word “tree,” the sound he or she makes is the signifier, and the concept of a tree is the signified. The relationship of the signifier to the signified determines the meaning of the sign. As David Macey notes in The Penguin Dictionary of Critical Theory , signs do not designate an external reality. Signs are meaningful only because of the similarities or differences that exist between them (365). Significantly, cultural communities determine the meanings and relationships of signs. A ghost that appears in a literary text such as William Shakespeare’s Hamlet takes on a specific meaning in a European culture. As demonstrated by “ Shakespeare in the Bush ,” however, the word ghost does not correspond to a concept in all cultures, preventing individuals of different cultures—in this case the Tiv of Nigeria in West Africa—from understanding what it means for a ghost to appear in Hamlet .Structuralist critics also look closely at patterns. For example, observing patterns in literature, critic Northrup Frye coined the term “green world” to describe the practice of release and reconciliation to which characters retreat in Shakespeare’s festive comedies. As You Like It epitomizes the characteristics associated with this pattern of festive comedy. The play begins in a masculine, courtly world where the playwright introduces the love interests of Rosalind and Orlando. After Rosalind is banished by her uncle, who has usurped the throne from her father, she retreats to the feminine green world of the forest. In the forest, she gives lessons to Orlando about how to court and properly treat her, and she reunites with her father. She facilitates the play’s reconciliation by marrying other characters in the play, including Phoebe and Silvius and Audrey and Touchstone. Rosalind also marries Orlando, and her father and her uncle reconcile in the “green world” as well. Shakespeare wrote other plays, such as Twelfth Night and The Two Gentlemen of Verona , which follow this pattern of retreat, release, and reconciliation. These plays also explore an opposition between the masculinity of the courtly world and the femininity of the “green world,” inviting the reader to analyze how each pole of the binary is valued.

Foundational Questions of Structuralist Criticism

• What patterns in the text reveal its similarities to other texts?
• What binary oppositions (e.g., light/dark, good/evil, old/young, masculine/feminine, and natural/artificial, etc.) operate in the text?
• How is each part of the binary valued? Does the binary imply a hierarchy (e.g., is light better than dark, is an old age more valuable than a young age, etc.)?

Online Example: STRUCTURALIST ANALYSIS OF D.H LAWRENCE’S “The White Stocking ” by A Brewis

Discussion Questions and Activities: Structuralist Criticism

• Define the following terms without looking at the article or your notes: sign, referent, and binary opposition.
• Explain the following concepts: sign and binary oppositions.
• Read “ Shakespeare in the Bush .” Explain why Laura Bohannan decides to abandon the words “ghosts” and “devil” to describe Hamlet’s deceased father, insisting that “a witch-sent omen it [he] would have to be.”
• Read Sonnet 127 by William Shakespeare. Analyze the poem’s use of words like “black,” “fair,” “fairing,” “beauty,” “art,” [“art’s”] and “false.” Write a paragraph about how the poem creates tension around the meaning of these words. For example, does the poem seem to contrast the meaning of words like black, fair, or beauty? How does the poem contrast the connotation of these words?

Analyze Sonnet 127 and write a paragraph in which you argue what relationship blackness and beauty share in the poem. Provide evidence from the poem for your viewpoint.

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Analysis Of Structuralism In Literary Texts English Literature Essay

crux of structuralism

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Saturday 21 March 2015

Structuralism and literary criticism: gerard genette.

Part II Application of Structuralism:

• An event can occur once and be narrated once (singular). (Give me more – Oliver) 
• 'Today I went to the shop.'
• An event can occur n times and be narrated once (iterative). (valour of Macbeth, sleepless nights)
• 'I used to go to the shop.'
• An event can occur once and be narrated n times (repetitive). (Tess’s molestation and its aftereffect)
• 'Today I went to the shop' + 'Today he went to the shop' etc.
• An event can occur n times and be narrated n times (multiple). (Moll’s escapades into immoral behaviour)
• 'I used to go to the shop' + 'He used to go to the shop' + 'I went to the shop yesterday' etc.
• "Five years passed", has a lengthy discourse time, five years, but a short narrative time (it only took a second to read).
• James Joyce's novel Ulysses has a relatively short discourse time, twenty-four hours. Not many people, however, could read Ulysses in twenty-four hours. Thus it is safe to say it has a lengthy narrative time.
• Where the narration is from
• Intra-diegetic: inside the text. eg. Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White(1859)(Chocolate, Musafir)
• Extra-diegetic: outside the text. eg. Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles
• Is the narrator a character in the story?
• Hetero-diegetic: the narrator is not a character in the story. eg. Homer's The Odyssey (Samay in Mahabharat,)
• Homo-diegetic: the narrator is a character in the story. eg. Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights (Moll Flanders) Pilgrim’s Progress

Roland Barthes - Mythologies

Roland Barthes - S/Z

Part iii what do struturalist critics do.

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• Think and Write: Being a structuralist critic, how would you analyse literary text or TV serial or Film? You can select any image or TV serial or film or literary text or advertisement. Apply structuralist method and post your write up on your blog. Give link of that blog-post in the comment section under this blog.

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Formalism, Dialogism, Structuralism

Cite this chapter.

• K. M. Newton  

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Though Russian Formalism has a strong claim to be the earliest analytic and theoretical approach to literature to emerge in the twentieth century, having its origins shortly before the Russian Revolution, it was little known in the English-speaking world until the emergence of structuralism in France aroused interest in earlier critical schools which had influenced structuralist critics. But whereas structuralism as a method came to prominence first — especially through the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss — in the field of social anthropology and then was applied to other areas, Russian Formalism was almost entirely concerned with literature. Indeed, one of its primary concerns was to make literary criticism a separate and coherent discipline. As one of its exponents, Boris Eikhenbaum, remarks in his essay, ‘The Theory of the Formal Method’, published as long ago as 1926, Russian Formalism’s method was ‘derived from efforts to secure autonomy and concreteness for the discipline of literary studies’. It endeavoured to establish the study of literature on a scientific basis and rejected the impressionistic or intuitive approaches of previous critics because they lacked rigour or method. Indeed, Eikhenbaum stresses Formalism’s connections with positivism when he writes of the need to break with ‘subjective-aesthetic principles’ in favour of ‘an objective-scientific attitude toward facts’ which is ‘the source of the new spirit of scientific positivism that characterizes the Formalists’. 1

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Further Reading

M. M. Bakhtin, Problems in Dostoevsky’s Poetics , trans. R. W. Rotsel (Michigan, 1973).

Google Scholar  

Seymour Chatman, Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film (Ithaca and London, 1978).

Victor Erlich, ed., Twentieth-Century Russian Literary Criticism (New Haven, Conn., 1975).

Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse , trans. Jane E. Lewin (Oxford, 1980).

Robert Scholes, Semiotics and Interpretation (New Haven, Conn., 1982).

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Newton, K.M. (1992). Formalism, Dialogism, Structuralism. In: Newton, K.M. (eds) Theory into Practice. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-22244-5_3

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Home › Uncategorized › Roland Barthes’ Contribution to Literary Criticism

Roland Barthes’ Contribution to Literary Criticism

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on March 20, 2016 • ( 2 )

Embodying a transformation from structuralism to poststructuralism, Roland Barthes, though initially characterised by a Marxist perspective, extended structural analysis and semiology to broad cultural phenomena, and promulgated and popularised the Poststructuralist notions of “the death of the author”, of the text as a site of freeplay, and the difference between the “work” and the “text” and the “readerly” and “writerly” text.

Barthes’ Writing Degree Zero examines the development of literary forms and analyses the literary movements represented by Flaubert and Mallarme. He points out that these writers attempt to divorce language from its sociality, to promote the creation of form as an end in itself, and to create “natural” modes of writing. In opposition to this, Barthes argues that language is inextricably bound to social institutions and norms.

Mythologies expressed Barthes’ resentment of the bourgeois attempts to naturalise or universalise their values and agenda, so that such values become the norm, and the rest become aberration and abnormality. Here, Barthes undertook an ideological critique of products of mass bourgeoisie culture. He introduced the concept of myth (which serves the purpose of such mystification), while he also cautions that there are no eternal myths, for myths are created by the bourgeoisie in every society. Barthes’ concept of myth has a tridimensional pattern where the signified of the first order signification becomes the signifier of the second order signification, through the operation of differance. Therefore myth consists of two semiological systems, where the object of the first is language and the second is myth or the metalanguage, which has multilayered signification, which Barthes illustrates with the example of the cover page of a Parisian magazine, where a young negro in French uniform salutes with his eyes uplifted, probably gazing at the French flag. Myth is a type of speech defined more by its intention than by its literal sense. Barthes explains that myth “essentially  aims at causing an immediate impression,” thereby encouraging the illusion and that myth is factual, while actually it is not. Thus naturalises history and empties reality, it is “depoliticised speech”. Barthes equates this process of myth making with the creation of bourgeois ideology.

His  primarily analyses four sets of concepts that create meaning: 1) language/speech (and concludes that language is always socialised)

2) signifier/signified — here Barthes deviates from Saussure’s idea that the relation between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary and argues that the connection between the two is a process that gets naturalised over a period of time.

3) syntagm/system — that parallels with Saussure’s syntagmatic and paradigmatic axes — operation of language as the interaction between two axes, where syntagmatic axis is the combination of signs, while the systemic axis is equivalent to Saussure’s langue.

4) denotation/connotation, which refer to the first and second order of signification respectively, and is closely associated with Barthes’ concept of myth.

In Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative  and S/Z Barthes developed a detailed model of narrative. Following a structuralist approach in S/Z , analysing Balzac’s “Sarrasine” he breaks up the narrative into 561 units (lexias) of meaning and studies how they combine with each other to generate meaning. Drawing parallels with Propp and Greimas, Barthes divided the lexias into 5 groups, all working in combination in a narrative. These 5 groups or codes are the narrative’s way of organising the units so that meaning is generated. These codes are proairetic code, hermeneutic code, the cultural code, the semic code and the symbolic code.

Echoing the views of Valery, Mallarme and Proust, Barthes questioned the centrality and authority of the author in The Death of the Author , arguing that the author should be viewed as a grammatical subject rather than a psychological one. He points out that with narration, the author loses his identity and “writing begins.” Thus Barthes deconstructs the centrality and the dependability of the author, undermining the liberal humanist tendency that since Renaissance had celebrated authorship. He observed that “writing is a performative act and every text is written here and now, and that text is a multidimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash.” Refusing absolute fixities, Barthes shifted focus from the author to “the reader, who, like the author, is a function of the text, is without history, biography and psychology”, but is only a function of the text.

Influenced by Marxism and Freudian psychoanalysis, Barthes in From Work to Text differentiates between the “work” and the “text”, arguing that the “text” is not stable and fixed, but fluid, multilayered and interdisciplinary. It is a “methodological field” marked by a subversive force against categorisation, since it spans multiple disciplines and genres. Opposed, to the “work” (which allows arriving at a definite meanings, the “text’ manifests endless postponement of the signified, which is revealed through disconnections, overlappings and variations. Thus the text is metonymic, decentred, open to endless investigation, comprised of differance, emanating from disjoint heterogeneous perspectives and held in intertextuality. Such a text (which Barthes terms as the “writerly text”) calls for active, productive and constitutive reading (as opposed to the work which is read passively) and gives rise to jouissane instead of plaisir , which he examines in The Pleasure of The Text.

Thus Barthes with his rich oeuvre of writings stand out as one of the most dynamic and tremendously influential critic of the 20th century, with his range of thoughts spanning across Marxism, Struciuralism, Narratology, Semiotics, Poststructuratism and most importantly Cultural Studies.

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