Structuralism in literary theory and criticism In literary theory, structuralist criticism relates literary texts to a larger structure, which

may be a particular genre, a range of intertextual connections, a model of a universal narrative structure, or a system of recurrent patterns or motifs.[12] Structuralism argues that there must be a structure in every text, which explains why it is easier for experienced readers than for non-experienced readers to interpret a text. Hence, everything that is written seems to be governed by specific rules, or a "grammar of literature", that one learns in educational institutions and that are to be unmasked.[13] A potential problem of structuralist interpretation is that it can be highly reductive, as scholar Catherine Belsey puts it: "the structuralist danger of collapsing all difference."[14] An example of such a reading might be if a student concludes the authors of 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 + Girl") despite the fact that they belong to two groups that hate each other ("Boy's Group - Girl's Group" or "Opposing forces") and conflict is resolved by their death. Structuralist readings focus on how the structures of the single text resolve inherent narrative tensions. If a structuralist reading focuses on multiple texts, there must be some way in which those texts unify themselves into a coherent system. 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 + Girl's Family") that arrange a marriage between their children despite the fact that the children hate each other ("Boy - 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 "literary banter of a text" can lie only in new

structure, rather than in the specifics of character development and voice in which that structure is expressed. Literary structuralism often follows the lead of Vladimir Propp, Algirdas Julien Greimas, and Claude Lvi-Strauss in seeking out basic deep elements in stories, myths, and more recently, anecdotes, which are combined in various ways to produce the many versions of the ur-story or urmyth. There is considerable similarity between structural literary theory and Northrop Frye's archetypal criticism, which is also indebted to the anthropological study of myths. Some critics have also tried to apply the theory to individual works, but the effort to find unique structures in individual literary works runs counter to the structuralist program and has an affinity with New Criticism. _______________________________________ Why We Read Generally speaking, a structuralist reads to identify and understand fundamental structures in absolutely anything by seeing a text (object, event, document, action, etc.) as part of an even larger system. Of course, a literary structuralist focuses on structures in "literary" texts (and a structuralist would help define "literary" by studying the deep structure in texts we label "literary"). The project is pseudoscientific because a structuralist supposedly only maps what is there. She does not evaluate; she only charts and compares or links one structure with another. A grammarian is a perfect example of a structuralist because she doesnt care about the content of the sentences she maps. She cares about how certain words function within a sentence. A structuralist does the exact same thing with literary texts; she wants to map the "grammar" of the text she studies. But why even do this? Structuralists still have enough humanist residue on them to study for the sake of knowledge. Admittedly, it is a pleasure perhaps to feel as though one understands the "fundamental" structure of anything and to make connections between texts.

n What We Read Structuralists are willing to read anything, for everything is part of a sign system, from literary texts to velvet paintings, from cars to a celebritys face, from ancient cultures to Madonna. In fact, this ability to move from one system to another is what makes structuralism so useful. The theory not only reveals that "literature" is a human construct (not an inherent or essential category), but that everything is a "text" in that everything is part of a sign system or "language." One can choose to focus (perhaps problematically) on "literary" systems or link "literary" systems to other systems. i.e. How does literary studies function within the larger structure of the university? of our economy? of certain ideologies? n How We Read You may want to consider these questions. While the questions here will help you, my writing hints also provide a kind of step-by-step methodology. First, look for repetitions, patterns, echoes, and oppositions in people, places, language, objects, movement, and decisions. Second, uncover the implications of the repetitions and oppositions by exploring the relationships of similarity and difference that link the storys events and actions. This is where you look for the metaphorical content in the people, places, language, objects, movement, and decisions. This is where you try to identify the allusions, the "subtexts," the connections between other texts. Finally, use your observations to come up with your claims as to the texts function, not meaning. Or put another way, the text's function is its meaning. Interpretation depends heavily on your ability to make connections, and this ability will improve as you read, study, and observe. One could argue that education is the process of learning to make connections. More connections become possible as you learn more. For example, I cant connect a

diaper ad with the Oedipus myth if I have never read Sophoclesbut I still need a way of seeing that helps me connect the two. Enter structuralism.... Writing Suggestions: Part One: Gathering Data/Prewriting Create at least two charts or diagrams: First, make a "t-chart" of what is valorized and devalorized in the text you are studying. Remember, by valorized, I mean what does the text seem to valorize, not what you valorize. Be sure as well to "flesh out" the chart as much as you can by including terms suggested by other terms. For example, in Blake's "Garden of Love," he includes terms like "green," "Garden," and "flowers," but these terms also seem to suggest "fertility," "growth," "nature," "life," "Eden," etc. In other words, include the connotations of the key words and concepts along with the key terms. Second, make a chart that identifies parallels, patterns, repetitions, echoes, contrasts, and cause and effect relationships within the text. Remember that you are reducing the text to a visual chart that indicates the fundamental structure of relations in plot, character, setting, imagery, and anything else you deem relevant. Be a map maker, a literary cartographer! Part Two: Making Meaning Make sense of your charts by explaining the deep structure in prose form. That is, persuade your reader that youre right about the deep structure that you have located. Justify your conclusions. Give reasons for your observations. Part Three: Making Connections Link the structure you have discovered to at least one other structure. For example, you could be a... ...literary critic and link your text with other "literary" texts (with texts within the same collection, by the same author, by the authors contemporaries, within the same genre, within the same time period). Even if you are focusing on a so-called non-literary text like an advertisement, you can link it to the "literary" tradition, or you may want to link your text to

whatever "genre" it belongs to (ads with other ads; social systems with other social systems, etc.) ... myth critic (albeit related to a literary critic because myths are arguably "literary" texts) and link your text with some myth, ancient or contemporary. That is, you can link a text to the myth of Apollo or to some specific American myth (i.e. the Western cowboy as a symbol of freedom, etc.). Please note there is more involved in myth criticism than I imply, but myth critics are, at the core, structuralists. (And structuralism helped me make that conclusion because I look at what literary critics do and what myth critics do and lo and behold, they share the same fundamental structure!) Thanks to his books and TV shows, Joseph Campbell is probably the most famous of myth scholars, and Northrop Frye, along with his Anatomy of Criticism, is the most famous literary myth critic. Although a kind of psychologist, Carl Jung also provides a useful framework to discuss myth in literary texts. All three of these guys provide frameworks or maps of basic story structures that we can use to make sense of other texts. ... cultural critic (more to come on this subject) and link your text with a more abstract structure (i.e. the structure of a text is similar to the structure of capitalismIf you work hard, you are supposed to be successful) or to other contemporary texts that we find in popular culture (i.e. If Braveheart were my text, I would link it to other medieval romances like Rob Roy, First Knight, etc. or to "action-adventure" films, for Braveheart is nothing more than a medieval action adventure story.) In sum, what you are doing is connecting one deep or basic structure with another. Structuralists are similar to New Critics in that New Critics also locate patterns, map structure, identify tensions, etc. but New Critics dont go beyond the text they study. The system they study is the text before them, nothing more. Their text is a discreet object, living an orphaned life. For the structuralists, however, the text is always part of larger systems, and one cant begin to study it without studying the larger systems.

In fact, a poem cant even be a poem unless we acknowledge that its part of a larger system (and shares fundamental traits, attributes, and structures with other texts that we call "poems").

Signifier: sequence of sounds or marks on a page (e.g., c-h-a-i-r) Signified: concept or meaning (idea of a chair)

analyzing these into codes to determine their underlying system, possibly relating them to other codes in the novel (e.g., dress). C. STRUCTURALISM: a method of enquiry, applying linguistic theory to a wide array of objects and activities; heavily influenced by cultural anthropology, especially that of Claude LviStrauss, who studied myths, kinship systems, rituals, etc. 1. Interested in langue rather than parole, in particular cultural phenomena primarily as these reveal the structures and rules of the general system 2. Regards signifying systems as culturally variable but the deep laws that govern these as universal, even as rooted in unchanging structures of the human mind (e.g. the creation of meaning through binary opposition--beautiful vs. ugly--and the effort to find a reconciling middle term--the "ugly duckling") 3. Structuralist literary critics attempt to identify the smallest meaningful units in a work ("mythemes," "deep structures") and study their modes of combination with a view to understanding how meaning is created rather than interpreting the actual meaning conveyed by the particular text e.g. Vladimir Propp in Morphology of the Folk Tale identified 31 fairy tale elements (e.g., hero leaves home; hero receives warning or prohibition; hero violates warning; villain discovers essential information about hero; etc.) which may not all appear in every tale but which always follow certain sequences 4. A structuralist approach to The Awakening might deal with a topic like "the nature/culture dichotomy," analyzing the oppositions between sea/land, Grand Isle/New Orleans, Kentucky farm childhood/Creole society adulthood, infatuation/marriage with swimming providing a possible middle term (social activity, bathing suits, controlled passage from land to sea to land) which in the end fails to reconcile the dichotomy (nakedness, land to sea to drowning)

http://mural.uv.es/crises/Structuralism.html

Structuralist Approaches A. BACKGROUND: Linguistics of Ferdinand Saussure (see Abrams, "Linguistics in Literary Criticism," pp. 103-107) 1. Distinction between

This whole sign stands in an arbitrary relation to its Referent, an externally existing object or action (the actual object on which I am sitting); this relation exists only because it is conventionally agreed upon within a particular language community. Saussure felt that linguists must bracket off the real object, direct their study away from the referent and concentrate solely on the sign in order to fully understand the workings of language. B. SEMIOTICS: systematic study of signs and signifying systems (a field of study which frequently uses the method of structuralism); may treat as quasi-languages objects and activities not immediately apparent as signs (often called "codes"; e.g., "gastronomic code":

parole: any particular meaningful use of spoken or written language (also called "performance") langue: the underlying system of sounds, forms, and rules of combination of a language which make meaningful communication possible (a speaker's implicit knowledge of this system is called "competence")

2. Principle of difference: in any language, difference from other elements in the linguistic system, rather than any positive property or correspondence to something existing outside the linguistic system, establishes identity and thus creates meaning.

"phonemes": elements considered edible (calves' brains but not eye of newt; snails but not insects) "morphemes": possible combinations of such elements (hot fudge but not gravy on ice cream) "syntax": order and method of consuming these elements (meat and potatoes before ice cream; use of fork and spoon)

Sounds ("phonemes"): compare bag, beg, big, bog, bug Forms ("morphemes"): compare its and it's Words ("semantemes"): compare beautiful and ugly Sentences ("syntax"): compare Mark loves Mary and Mary loves Mark.

1. Emphasis on langue rather than parole, on how meaning is created in these signifying systems rather than on what the particular meaning is; interested in relational aspects of signifying systems 2. Literary semioticians are particularly interested in poetry, which may be analyzed as foregrounding the signifier, calling attention to its sound and appearance on the page, etc. 3. A semiotic approach to The Awakening might deal with a topic like "eating as sign," studying the relations of all references to eating in the novel,

3. Sign: composed of the union of

5. Structuralists are not concerned with consumption of literature, about what happens when people actually read the works, about the role of literature in social relations. http://www2.cnr.edu/home/bmcmanus/structuralism. html

buildings built in urban America in 1850 to discover the underlying principles that govern their composition, for example, principles of mechanical construction or of artistic form..." you are using a structuralist lens (Tyson 197). Moreover, "you are also engaged in structuralist activity if you examine the structure of a single building to discover how its composition demonstrates underlying principles of a structural system. In the first example...you're generating a structural system of classification; in the second, you're demonstrating that an individual item belongs to a particular structural class" (Tyson 197). Structuralism in Literary Theory Structuralism is used in literary theory, for example, "...if you examine the structure of a large number of short stories to discover the underlying principles that govern their composition...principles of narrative progression...or of characterization...you are also engaged in structuralist activity if you describe the structure of a single literary work to discover how its composition demonstrates the underlying principles of a given structural system" (Tyson 197-198). Northrop Frye, however, takes a different approach to structuralism by exploring ways in which genres of Western literature fall into his four mythoi (also see Jungian criticism in the Freudian Literary Criticism resource): 1. 2. 3. 4. theory of modes, or historical criticism (tragic, comic, and thematic); theory of symbols, or ethical criticism (literal/descriptive, formal, mythical, and anagogic); theory of myths, or archetypal criticism (comedy, romance, tragedy, irony/satire); theory of genres, or rhetorical criticism (epos, prose, drama, lyric) (Tyson 240).

Peirce and Saussure Two important theorists form the framework (hah) of structuralism: Charles Sanders Peirce and Ferdinand de Saussure. Peirce gave structuralism three important ideas for analyzing the sign systems that permeate and define our experiences: 1. "iconic signs, in which the signifier resembles the thing signified (such as the stick figures on washroom doors that signify 'Men' or 'Women'; indexes, in which the signifier is a reliable indicator of the presence of the signified (like fire and smoke); true symbols, in which the signifier's relation to the thing signified is completely arbitrary and conventional [just as the sound /kat/ or the written word cat are conventional signs for the familiar feline]" (Richter 810).

for whom language was the sign system par excellence" (810). Typical questions:

Structuralism and Semiotics (1920s-present) Linguistic Roots The structuralist school emerges from theories of language and linguistics, and it looks for underlying elements in culture and literature that can be connected so that critics can develop general conclusions about the individual works and the systems from which they emerge. In fact, structuralism maintains that "...practically everything we do that is specifically human is expressed in language" (Richter 809). Structuralists believe that these language symbols extend far beyond written or oral communication. For example, codes that represent all sorts of things permeate everything we do: "the performance of music requires complex notation...our economic life rests upon the exchange of labor and goods for symbols, such as cash, checks, stock, and certificates...social life depends on the meaningful gestures and signals of 'body language' and revolves around the exchange of small, symbolic favors: drinks, parties, dinners" (Richter 809). Patterns and Experience Structuralists assert that, since language exists in patterns, certain underlying elements are common to all human experiences. Structuralists believe we can observe these experiences through patterns: "...if you examine the physical structures of all

2. 3.

These elements become very important when we move into deconstruction in the Postmodernism resource. Peirce also influenced the semiotic school of structuralist theory that uses sign systems. Sign Systems The discipline of semiotics plays an important role in structuralist literary theory and cultural studies. Semioticians "...appl[y] structuralist insights to the study of...sign systems...a non-linguistic object or behavior...that can be analyzed as if it were a language" (Tyson 205). Specifically, "...semiotics examines the ways non-linguistic objects and behaviors 'tell' us something. For example, the picture of the reclining blond beauty in the skin-tight, black velvet dress on the billboard...'tells' us that those who drink this whiskey (presumably male) will be attractive to...beautiful women like the one displayed here" (Tyson 205). Lastly, Richter states, "semiotics takes off from Peirce - for whom language is one of numerous sign systems - and structuralism takes off from Saussure,

Using a specific structuralist framework (like Frye's mythoi)...how should the text be classified in terms of its genre? In other words, what patterns exist within the text that make it a part of other works like it? Using a specific structuralist framework...analyze the text's narrative operations...can you speculate about the relationship between the...[text]... and the culture from which the text emerged? In other words, what patterns exist within the text that make it a product of a larger culture? What patterns exist within the text that connect it to the larger "human" experience? In other words, can we connect patterns and elements within the text to other texts from other cultures to map similarities that tell us more about the common human experience? This is a liberal humanist move that assumes that since we are all human, we all share basic human commonalities What rules or codes of interpretation must be internalized in order to 'make sense' of the text? What are the semiotics of a given category of cultural phenomena, or 'text,' such as high-school football games, television and/or magazine ads for a particular brand of perfume...or even media coverage of an historical event? (Tyson 225)

http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/722/07/

Structuralism and its Application to Literary Theory This is a collection of ideas from various authors gathered together by Professor John Lye for the use of his students. This document is copyright John Lye 1996, but may be freely used for non-proft purposes. If you have any suggestions for improvement, please mail me at literarism@in.com. I. General Principles 1. Meaning occurs through difference: Meaning is not identification of the sign with object in the real world or with some pre-existent concept or essential reality; rather it is generated by difference among signs in a signifying system. For instance, the meaning of the words woman and lady are established by their relations to one another in a meaning-field. They both refer to a human female, but what constitutes human and what constitutes female are themselves established through difference, not identity with any essence, or ideal truth, or the like. 2. Relations among signs are of two sorts, contiguity and substitutability, the axes of combination and selection: hence the existence of all grammars, hence all substitutions, hence the ability to know something by something else, or by a part of it in some way hence metonymy and metaphor. The conception of combination and selection provides the basis for an analysis of literariness or poeticality in the use, repetition and variation of sound patterns and combinations. It also provides keys to the most fundamental elements of culture. 3. Structuralism notes that much of our imaginative world is structured of, and structured by, binary oppositions (being/nothingness, hot/cold, culture/nature); these oppositions structure meaning, and one can describe fields of cultural thought, or topoi, by describing the binary sets which compose them. As an illustration, here is a binary set for the monstrous 4. Structuralism forms the basis for semiotics, the study of signs: a sign is a union of signifier and signified, and is anything that stands for anything

else (or, as Umberto Eco put it, a sign is anything that can be used to lie). 5. Central too to semiotics is the idea of codes, which give signs context cultural codes, literary codes, etc. The study of semiotics and of codes opens up literary study to cultural study, and expands the resources of the critic in discussing the meaning of texts. Structuralism, says, Genette, is a study of the cultural construction or identification of meaning according to the relations of signs that constitute the meaning-spectrum of the culture. 6. Some signs carry with them larger cultural meanings, usually very general; these are called, by Roland Barthes, myths, or second-order signifiers. Anything can be a myth. For example, two-story pillars supporting the portico of a house are a mythic signifier of wealth and elegance. 7. Structuralism introduces the idea of the subject, as opposed to the idea of the individual as a stable indivisible ego. Toquote from Kaja Silverman in The Subject of Semiotics, The term subject foregrounds the relationship between ethnology, psychoanalysis, and semiotics. It helps us to conceive of human reality as a construction, as the product of signifying activities which are both culturally specific and generally unconscious. The category of the subject thus calls into question the notions both of the private, and of a self synonymous with consciousness. It suggests that even desire is culturally instigated, and hence collective; and it de-centers consciousness, relegating it.to a purely receptive capacity. Finally, by drawing attention to the divisions which separate one area of psychic activity from another, the term subject challenges the value of stability attributed to the individual. The value of the conception is that it allows us to open up, conceptually, the inner world of humans, to see the relation of human experience to cultural experience, to talk cogently of meaning as something that is structured into our selves.

There is no attempt here to challenge the meaningfulness of persons; there is an attempt to dethrone the ideology of the ego, the idea that the self is an eternal, indivisible essence, and an attempt to redefine what it is to be a person. The self is, like other things, signified and culturally constructed. Post-structuralism, in particular, will insist that the subject is de-centered. 8. The conception of the constructed subject opens up the borders between the conscious and the unconscious. The unconscious itself is not some strange, impenetrable realm of private meaning but is constructed through the sign-systems and through the repressions of the culture. Both the self and the unconscious are cultural constructs. 9. In the view of structuralism our knowledge of reality is not only coded but also conventional, that is, structured by and through conventions, made up of signs and signifying practices. This is known as the social construction of reality. 10. There is, then, in structuralism, a coherent connection among the conceptions of reality, the social, the individual, the unconscious: they are all composed of the same signs, codes and conventions, all working according to similar laws.

This sort of study opens up for serious cultural analysis texts which had hitherto been closed to such study because they did not conform to the rules of literature, hence were not literature but popular writing or private writing or history and so forth. When the rules of literary meaning are seen as just another set of rules for a signifying arena of a culture, then literature loses some aspects of its privileged status, but gains in the strength and cogency of its relationship to other areas of signification. Hence literary study has expanded to the study of textuality, popular writing has been opened up to serious study, and the grounds for the relationship between the meaning-conventions of literature and the way in which a culture imagines reality have been set, and we can speak more clearly of the relation of literary to cultural (or, human, or every-day) meanings. As everything that can be known, can be known by virtue of its belonging to a signifying system, then everything can be spoken of as being textual. All documents can be studied as texts for instance, history or sociology can be analyzed the way literature can be. All of culture can be studied as text. Anthropology, among other fields, is revolutionized through ethnography; qualitative rather than quantitative study becomes more and more the norm in many areas of social science. Belief-systems can be studied textually and their role in constructing the nature of the self understood. Consequently much greater attention is paid to the nature of language-use in culture. Language-use relating to various social topics or areas of engagement has become known as discourse. Although discourse is a term more prevalent in post-structuralist thinking, it is of its nature a structuralist development.

II. Structuralism, culture and texts Structuralism enables both the reading of texts and the reading of cultures: through semiotics, structuralism leads us to see everything as textual, that is, composed of signs, governed by conventions of meaning, ordered according to a pattern of relationships. Structuralism enables us to approach texts historically or trans-culturally in a disciplined way. Whenever we have to look more objectively, when we are transversing barriers of time, say, or of culture or interest, then the structural method, the search for principles of order, coherence and meaning, become dominant.

III. Structuralism and literature See my summary of Gerard Genettes Structuralism and Literary Criticism for more ideas.

In extending the range of the textual we have not decreased the complexity or meaning-power of literature but have in fact increased it, both in its textual and in its cultural meaningfulness. If the reader and the text are both cultural constructions, then the meaningfulness of texts becomes more apparent, as they share meaning-constructs; if the cultural is textual, then the cultures relation to the textuality of literature becomes more immediate, more pertinent, more compelling. Literature is a discourse in a world of discourses, each discourse having its protocols for meaning and typical uses of language, rhetoric, subject area and so forth. The thesis that what seems real to us is coded and conventional leads to a consideration of how reality is represented in art what we get is a reality effect; the signs which represent reality are naturalized, that is, made to seem as if we could see reality through them or in another way of saying, made to seem to be conforming to the laws of reality. This is achieved through vraisemblance, truth-seeming, or naturalization. Some elements of vraisemblance (from Culler, Structuralist Poetics) are as follows. There is the socially given text, that which is taken as the real world what is taken for granted. That we have minds and bodies, for instance. This is a textual phenomenon. (Every term of we have minds and bodies, the relations between most of these terms, and what we mean by them, in fact codify culturally specific assumptions.) There is the general cultural text: shared knowledge which would be recognized by participants as part of culture and hence subject to correction or modification but which none the less serves as a kind of nature. This is the level at which we interpret motive, character and significance from descriptions of action, dress, attitude and so forth. Jake put on his tuxedo and tennis shoes will provide an interpretation of Jake or will look forward to an explanation of why he broke the cultural code, in this case a dress code. Harry gazed for hours on the picture of Esmeralda is a culturally coded statement: we read Harrys attitude, and so forth. We imitate reality by recording cultural codes.

There are the conventions of genre, a specifically literary and artificial vraisemblance the series of constituent conventions which enable various sorts of works to be written. The lines Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; The center cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world

register meaning at a level of the project of interpretation itself, and so comment as it were on the relation between textual and interpretive reality. In short, to imitate reality is to represent codes which describe (or, construct) reality according to the conventions of representation of the time. The conventions of reading. We read according to certain conventions; consequently our reading creates the meaning of that which we read. These conventions come in two layers: (1). how we (culturally) think that reality is or should be represented in texts, which will include the general mimetic conventions of the art of the period, which will describe the way in which reality is apprehended or imagined, and (2) the conventions of literature (and of art generally), for instance, 1. the rule of significance whereby we raise the meaning of the text to its highest level of generalizability (a tree blasted by lightning might become a figure of the power of nature, or of God); 2. the convention of figural coherence, through which we assume that figures (metonyms, metaphors, symbols) will have a signifying relationship to one another on a level of meaning more complex than or higher than the physical; 3. the convention of thematic unity, whereby we assume that all of the elements of the text contribute to the meaning of the text. These are all conventions of reading. 4. The facts that some works are difficult to interpret, some are difficult to interpret for its contemporaries but not for later readers, some require that we learn how its contemporaries would have read them in order fully to understand them, these facts point to the existence of literary competence, the possession by the reader of protocols for reading. When one reads modernist texts, such as The Waste Land, one has to learn how to read them. One has in fact to learn how to read Blakes Songs of Innocence and Experience, Spensers The Faerie Queene, and so forth. Culler remarks that

reading poetry is a rule-governed process of producing meanings; the poem offers a structure which must be filled up and one therefore attempts to invent something, guided by a series of formal rules derived from ones experience of reading poetry, which both make possible invention and impose limits on it. 5. Structuralism is oriented toward the reader insofar as it says that the reader constructs literature, that is, reads the text with certain conventions and expectations in mind. Some post-structural theorists, Fish for instance, hold that the reader constructs the text entirely, through the conventions of reading of her interpretive community. 6. In joining with formalism in the identification of literariness as the focus on the message itself as opposed to a focus on the addressee, the addresser, or the referential function of the message, structuralism places ambiguity, as Genette points out, at the heart of the poetic function, as its self-referential nature puts the message, the addresser and the addressee all in doubt. Hence literary textuality is complexly meaningful. 7. Structuralism underlines the importance of genre, i.e., basic rules as to how subjects are approached, about conventions of reading for theme, level of seriousness, significance of language use, and so forth. Different genres lead to different expectations of types of situations and actions, and of psychological, moral, and esthetic values. (Genette) 8. The idea that literature is an institution is another structuralist contribution; that a number of its protocols for creation and for reading are in fact controlled by that institutional nature. 9. Through structuralism, literature is seen as a whole: it functions as a system of meaning and reference no matter how many works there are, two or two thousand. Thus any work becomes the parole, the individual articulation, of a cultural langue, or system of signification. As literature is a system, no work of literature is an autonomous whole; similarly, literature itself is not autonomous

require certain conventions of reading. If we were to read it as part of a paragraph in Dickens they would make less sense. One convention of literature is that there is a persona who is articulating the text that it comes from some organizing consciousness which can be commented on and described. Genre is another convention: each genre designates certain kinds of action as acceptable and excludes others.

There is what might be called the natural attitude to the artificial, where the text explicitly cites and exposes vraisemblance of the kind directly above, so as to reinforce its own authority. The narrator may claim that he is intentionally violating the conventions of a story, for instance, that he knows that this is not the way it should be done according to the conventions, but that the way he is doing it serves some higher or more substantial purpose the appeal is to a greater naturalness or a higher intelligibility. There is the complex vraisemblance of specific intertextualities. When a text cites or parodies the conventions of a genre one interprets it by moving to another level of interpretation where both terms of the opposition can be held together by the theme of literature itself. e.g. parody, when one exploits the particular conventions of a work or style or genre, etc. Irony forces us to posit an alternate possibility or reality in the face of the realityconstruction of the text. All surface incongruities

but is part of the larger structures of signification of the culture. 10. The following are some points based on Cullers ideas about the advantages of structuralism, having to do with the idea that literature is a protocol of reading: Structuralism is a firmer starting-point for reading literature as literature than are other approaches, because literariness and/or fictionality does not have to be shown to be inherent in the text, but in the way it is read. It explains, for instance, why the same sentence can have a different meaning depending on the genre in which it appears, it explains how the boundaries of the literary can change from age to age, it accommodates and explains differing readings of a text given differing reading protocols one can read a text for its literary qualities or for its sociological or ideological qualities, for instance, and read as complex a text in doing so. One gains an appreciation of literature as an institution, as a coherent and related set of codes and practices, and so one sees also that reading is situated reading, that is, it is in a certain meaningdomain or set of codes. It follows that when literature is written, it will be written under these codes (it can break or alter the codes to create effects, but this is still a function of the codes). Consequently one can be more open to challenges to and alterations of literary conventions. Once one sees that reading and writing are both coded and based on conventions one can read against the grain in a disciplined way, and one can read readings of literature reading can become a more self-reflexive process. IV. Structural Analysis As structuralism is so broad a theory with such extensive ramifications, there will be different ways of doing structural analysis. Here are some possible approaches.

The study of the basic codes which make narrative possible, and which make it work. This is known generally as narratology, and often produces what might be called a grammar of narrative. Greimas, Barthes, Todorov and others investigated what the components and relations of narrative are. This gives rise to such things as Barthes division of incidents into nuclei and catalyzers, and his promulgation of five codes of narrative, given briefly here, as adapted from Cohen and Shires: 1. proairetic things (events) in their sequence; recognizable actions and their effects. 2. semic the field where signifiers point to other signifiers to produce a chain of recognizable connotations. In a general sense, that which enables meaning to happen. 3. hermeneutic the code of narrative suspense, including the ways in which the story suspends closure, structures parallels, repetitions and so forth toward closure. 4. symbolic marks out meaning as difference; the binaries which the culture uses/enacts to create its meanings; binaries which, of course,but disunite and join. 5. reference refers to various bodies of knowledge which constitute the society; creates the familiarity of reality by quoting from a large assortment of social texts which mediate and organize cultural knowledge of reality medicine, law, morality, psychology, philosophy, religion, plus all the clichs and proverbs of popular culture. 6. diegetic (C&Ss addition) the narration, the texts encoding of narrative conventions that signify how it means as a telling. The study of the construction of meaning in texts, as for instance through tropes, through repetitions with difference. Hayden White analyzes the structure of Western historical narrative through a theory of tropes; Lodge shows how metaphor and metonymy can be seen to form the bases respectively of symbolic and realist texts.

The study of mimesis, that is, of the representation of reality, becomes i) the study of naturalization, of the way in which reality effects are created and the way in which we create a sense of reality and meaning from texts; ii) the study of conventions of meaning in texts. Texts are also analyzed for their structures of opposition, particularly binary oppositions, as informing structures and as representing the central concerns and imaginative structures of the society. Texts can be analyzed as they represent the codes and conventions of the culture we can read the texts as ways of understanding the meaningstructures of the cultures and sub-cultures out of which they are written and which they represent. http://literarism.blogspot.com/2011/11/structuralismand-its-application-to.html

to Barthes distinctions to suggest that some literary criticism may be literature. He then defines literariness in a way much like a formalist would: literariness is language production in which the attention is addressed to spectacle rather than message -- something one supposes like Jakobson's poetic function, or meta-poetic; in fact to put it right into Jakobson's terms, the attention is on the poetic rather than on the referential function, on medium rather than on message. Genette will later in the essay insist that this does not degrade the meaning-function of the language. Genette as well refers to that aspect of literature which is so close to the New Critical understanding of ambiguity, the 'halt', the attention to the constitution of meaning under a different aspect, that also characterizes the literary; so it is that there is only a literary function , no literariness in any essential or material sense. Genette's sense of the ambiguity of literature is similar to Jakobson's in "Linguistics and Poetics", in which essay he writes that "Ambiguity is an intrinsic, inalienable character of any self-focused message, briefly a corollary feature of poetry...Not only the message itself but the addresser and the addressee become ambiguous." (pp 49-50 in Lodge). 2: The role of the critic: The critic is secondary to the writer, a bricoleur to the writer's engineer, but in a position therefore to be primary in the analysis of culture. The critic treats as signs what the writer is creating as concept: the attitude, the disposition is different. The critic in reading literature as signs is reading it as a cultural production, constructed according to various preconceptions, routines, traditions and so forth of that culture. The critic does not ignore the meaning, but treats it as mediated by signs, not directly encountered. (65T) Where the post-structuralist will differ is in their denial that anything can be transparent: all concepts are themselves constructed of signs, there is no unmediated thought, all mediated thought is social thought, there is no attachment to anything beyond the sign.

"Structuralism and Literary Criticism" Prepared for his students in ENGL 4F70, "Contemporary Literary Theory" at Brock University by Professor John Lye, who takes full responsibility for any distortions he may have effected in the meanings of Genette's work. The pagination in brackets refers to the text as republished in David Lodge, Modern Criticism and Theory. 1: The critic and the literary: Genette first introduces the good structuralist conception of the bricoleur as opposed to the engineer; it will turn out that a critic is a bricoleur , working with what is to hand. Genette turns the artist into the engineer, a rather literary-critical thing to do. Genette then makes the point that as literary criticism uses language to speak of language use, it is in fact a metaliterature, a literature on a literature. Poststructuralists will challenge the distinction between the two, and Genette here refers

3: Structuralism is more than a linguistic exercise. While structuralism historically (in Europe) is a linguistic phenomenon, and it would seem reasonable th at structuralist criticism would then be linguistic in its nature, this is too simple an assumption.

controls the attitudes towards it. What is the place of this individual work in the systems of representation? That is a key question. 4: Structuralism is about meaning, not just about form. Genette is at pains to point out that structuralism is not just about form, but about meaning, as linguistics is about meaning. It is a study of the cultural construction or identification of meaning according to the relations of signs that constitute the meaning-spectrum of the culture. (67 ft) When Jakobson writes of the centrality of tropes to imaginative writing, he places the categories of meaning at the heart of the structural method, as tropes, including metaphor and metonymy, are the way we say something by saying something else, figures of signification. Ambiguity, which is a meaning-function, is at the heart of the poetic function, as we saw in #1 above. Finally in this section, Genette looks forward to structural analysis at the more macro level of the text, of the analysis of narratives, for instance -- "an analysis that could distinguish in them [that is, larger units], by a play of superimpositions [and hence knowledge through difference], variabvle elements and constant functions, and to rediscover in them the bi-axial system, familiar to Saussureanlinguistics, of syntagmatic relations (real connections of functions in the continuity of a text) and paradigmatic relations (virtual relations between similar or oposed functions, form one text to another, in the whole of the corpus considered)>"[68t] 5: Structuralism is a general tendency of thought (Cassirer) Structuralism is, however, not necessarily an intrinsic fact of nature but rather is a way of thinking; [68] structures are"systems of latent relations, conceived rather than perceived, which analysis constructs as it uncovers them, and which it runs the risk of inventing while believing that it is discovering them" -- that is, structures are explanations of coherence and repetition, they appear in what they seek to explain, they in a sense provide the terms and the vehicle of explanation. as we can only now through knowledge frames. Structuralism is the explanation of texts or events in

their own terms (as those terms are conceived), not in relation to external causes. When one turns to the internal dynamic of a text as an object, a field of meanings, and to the coherence of it as a text, rather than as biography or sociology, one reads structurally. Structuralist reading abandons pyschological, sociological, and such explanations. One can see New Criticism as a structural methodology, although it is not structuralism: in structural analysis of theme, for instance, theme would be seen in the context of the relations of themes, that is, of certain elements of filaments of the configuration, or network or matrix of, of social meanings, which meanings constitute culture. 6: Structuralism is however not merely intrinsic criticism, the criticism of the thing itself. Genette mentions the other form of intrinsic criticism, phenomenological criticism, in which one becomes in touch with the subjectivity of the creative voice of the work. Ricoeur refers to this, Genette writes, as the hermeneutic method: the intuitive convergence to two consciousnesses, the authors and the readers. This is a little confusing, because this is not hermeneutics properly speaking, but rather phenomenological hermeneutics. When there is hermeneutics, Genette says, when the text is available to us in that immediate a way, then structural reading fades; but whenever we have to look more objectively, when we are transversing barriers of time, say, or of culture or interest, then the structural method, the search for principles of order, coherence and meaning, becomes dominant - literatures [71t] distant in place and time, children's literature, popular literature. Genette goes on to suggest that the difference between hermeneutic and structural reading is a matter of the critical position of the critic -- (between identity and distance, say). Structuralism is an intrinsic reading free from subjectivity, when we become the ethnomethodologists of our culture (71). 7: Structuralism ties the meaning of the work to the meanings of the culture. (72) Genette suggests that topics is an area of study that

First of all, literary language is language used to certain ends, having a certain function and therefore featuring the qualities of linguistic production and the relationships of sounds and meaning in a particular way. The ends then are important. As he writes on page 66, structuralist method as such is constituted at the very moment when one rediscovers the message in the code, uncovered by an analysis of the immanent structures and not imposed from the outside by ideological prejudices. (Poststructuralists will deny that anything can be innocent of ideology.) Second, there is a homology, a structural relationship, between the way language cuts up the world of meaning, and the way literature and literary genres do. There is an analogy between literature and linguistics not only because they are both involved in language but because both deal with: 1. the relation between forms and meanings, 2. the way reality is culturally defined by the segmentation and identification of experience, 3. the cultural perception of reality, and 4. the systemic relationships of signs which underlie those cultural perceptions.

structuralism can bring us to -- the traditional subjects and forms of the culture (from the Greek topos, 'place'; I prefer to refer to culturallyconstucted sites of meaning as topoi, to try to retain the full meaning of the idea). Topics, or topoi, are structural in that they underlie the way we talk and think about things in our culture. They are in a sense psychological, Genette says [72], but collectively so, not individually. Throughout, in writing of the cultural knowledge that structuralism provides, Genette has been suggesting that 'high' literature is not the only, perhaps not the primary, location for the study of cultural meanings: the serious study of popular culture has begun. 8: Structuralism opens the study of genre to new light. Different genres predispose the reader to different attitudes, different expectations [cf. the saying, attributed to Voltaire, that life is a comedy to he who thinks and a tragedy to he who feels, which saying suggests a way in which genres might look differently at experience]. Different genres lead to different expectations of types of situations and actions, and of psychological, moral, and esthetic values. Without conventional expectations we cannot have the difference, the surprise, the reversals which mark the more brilliant exercise of creativity. Hence creativity is in a sense structural, as it depends on our expectation, which it them plays upon. 9: Structuralism can be applied to the study of literature as a whole, as a meaning system. Structurally, literature is a whole; it functions as a system of meaning and reference no matter how many works there are, two or two thousand. Thus any work becomes the parole, the individual articulation, of a cultural langue, or system of signification. As literature is a system, no work of literature is an autonomous whole; similarly, literature itself is not autonomous but is part of the larger structures of signification of the culture. 10: Structuralism studies literature synchronically, but with diachronic awareness. Structuralism studies literature historically by studying it as it were in cross-section at different

Genette writes on p. 67 of the idea of a table of concordance, variable in its details but constant in its function: it is the function, not the detail, that concerns structuralist thought. One of the elements of literature that Genette deals with later is genre, which segments experience in certain ways, and

times, by seeing in what way literature divides up the traditional topics of the cultural imagination. Change is intrinsic to literature, as the Russian formalists thought; what the change registers is the alterations of the relations of meaning within the culture. Structuralism can then yield a fruitful approach to the history of literature, not as a series of great works, or of influences of one writer upon another, but more structurally, more systematically, as the way in which a culture's discourse with itself alters. The meaning of an individual work is ultimately and inevitably only the meaning within a larger frame of cultural meanings, and these meanings change in relation to one another across time and cultures. As well, the addition of other signifying systems, such as cinema, alter but do not disrupt the system of literature. A structural analysis of the construction of cultural meaning can thence replace the meaning of the individual instance, the particular work, while the meaning of the individual work is illumined and rendered more fully significant by being read in the context of its full systemic, cultural meaning. http://www.brocku.ca/english/courses/4F70/genette. php

generates a vocabulary of oppositions, all of which are more or less synonymous: langue and parole, synchrony and diachrony, system and event, signifier and signified, code and message, metaphor and metonymy, paradigm and syntagm, selection and combination, substitution and context, similarity and contiguity. In each case the first term is privileged. Although Saussurian linguistics is its paradigm, what is of interest is how structuralism analogically extends Saussure's terms into the analysis of literature. Roland Barthes provides a good example. "Literature" Barthes writes, "is simply a language, a system of signs. Its being [tre] is not in its message, but in this 'system.' Similarly, it is not for criticism to reconstitute the message of a work, but only its system, exactly as the linguist does not decipher the meaning of a sentence, but establishes the formal structure which allows the meaning to be conveyed." Rather than interpreting the meaning or value of a work, the critic examines the structures that produce meaning. The intentionality of the author is thereby disregarded; language and structures -- not the consciousness of an author or the willed verbal acts that eminate from it -- generate meaning. As a consequence, the subject is dissolved into a series of systems, deprived of its role as a source of meaning, and thereby decentered. The self is an intersubjective construct, a place where codes and conventions interact. In addition, the reader is privileged at the expense of the author, for, as Jonathan Culler points out, "the text is a kind of formless space whose shape is imposed by structured modes of reading." The operative concept is intertextuality. "We now know," Barthes writes, "that the text is not a line of words releasing a single 'theological meaning' (the 'message' of an AuthorGod) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from innumerable centers of culture." Nevertheless, he goes on to say, "there is one place where this multiplicity is focused and that place is the reader, not, as was hitherto said, the author. The reader is

the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed . . . . A text's unity lies not in its origin but in its destination." Codes, according to Barthes, equal the already read [dj lu]; the reader is the place where the various codes are located. (See also Linguistics and literary theory, Semiotics.) http://www.library.utoronto.ca/utel/glossary/Structura lism.html

Father It's not time to make a change, Just relax, take it easy. You're still young, that's your fault, There's so much you have to know. Find a girl, settle down, If you want you can marry. Look at me, I am old, but I'm happy. I was once like you are now, and I know that it's not easy, To be calm when you've found something going on. But take your time, think a lot, Why, think of everything you've got. For you will still be here tomorrow, but your dreams may not. Son How can I try to explain, when I do he turns away again. It's always been the same, same old story. From the moment I could talk I was ordered to listen. Now there's a way and I know that I have to go away. I know I have to go. Father It's not time to make a change, Just sit down, take it slowly.

You're still young, that's your fault, There's so much you have to go through. Find a girl, settle down, If you want you can marry. Look at me, I am old, but I'm happy. (Son-- Away Away Away, I know I have to Make this decision alone - no) Son All the times that I cried, keeping all the things I knew inside, It's hard, but it's harder to ignore it. If they were right, I'd agree, but it's them They know not me. Now there's a way and I know that I have to go away. I know I have to go. (Father-- Stay Stay Stay, Why must you go and Make this decision alone?)

Structuralism: A theory of literature that focuses on the codes and conventions that undergird all discourse and on the system of language as a functioning totality. This system Ferdinand de Saussure calls langue, "the whole set of linguistic habits which allow an individual to understand and to be understood." Anticausal and antiphilological, structuralism deliberately ignores the historical origins of the various elements of language, the external context of linguistic acts, the agents who use language, and the individual speech acts themselves (parole). Structuralism sees language as a system of differences without any positive terms, embraces the arbitrariness and conventionality of the sign, brackets any consideration of the referent, and