Structuralism

Structuralism is interested in the underlying structure (i.e., the patterns, forms, etc) of a category (e.g., a literary genre). Rather than focusing on individual instances, it is interested in finding the system that binds together those instances into a larger group. Less a field of study in and of itself, it is an approach, a means of uncovering order that can be used in many different fields of study.

It is about finding the invisible world underneath the visible one (think about Plato's Allegory of the Cave and The Matrix from Chapter 2').

Origins of Structuralism

The linguistic theories of Swiss academic Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913) form the foundations of structuralist criticism. After his death, students (Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye) used their notes from linguistic courses Saussure taught between 1907 and 1911 to publish Course in General Linguistics (1916).

It is difficult to understate how much this book shaped modern linguistics and many other areas, including literary theory. Structuralists use semiotic theory (the study of signs): rather than studying language as a history of changes, Saussure and those that followed looked at language as a structure governed by a set of rules.

As Lois Tyson points out in her textbook, Critical Theory Today: A User-Friendly Guide (3rd edition, 2015), Structuralism holds that "the order we see in the world is the order we impose on it” (Tyson 199).

Realted Materials

• From Saussure's Course in General Linguistics.
  • If you are interested in reading the whole book, it is available online here.
• Here are some useful visual presentations of Saussure's work:
  • Overview from Columbia University
  • YouTube Video Presentation on Saussure

Structural Linguistics

What is a Structure?

• Surface vs. Structure: Surface phenomena the instances (e.g. individual words); structure is how they fit together (e.g. parts of speech and rules of combination)
• Wholeness, transformation, and self-regulation: Together these three elements make a structure.
  • Wholeness: the system functions as a unit
  • Transformation: the system changes over time: it is dynamic, not static
  • Self-Regulation: although a system will undergo transformations, those changes never go beyond the structural system. They still belong to the system and follow its foundational rules.

  Key Concepts from Ferdinand de Saussure

  (See Saussure's Course in General Linguistics)
  • "The Scientific Study of Languages": Saussure sees this as a major development in the study of linguistics. Think about how borrowing from the concept of the sciences (think of the scientific method, etc) fits into his argument for uncovering the invisible structures of language. (Saussure. 28 October 1910)
  • Social Product: "By distinguishing thus between the language and the faculty of language, we see that the language is what we may call a 'product': it is a 'social product'; .... Language, in turn, is quite independent of the individual; it cannot be a creation of the individual, it is essential socially, it presupposes the collectivity" (4 November 1910).
  • Language (langue) vs speech (parole)
    • Language/langue: This is syntax, phonology (system of sounds, especially for a language), a system of signs shared by a speech community. In other words, "the 'system of signs' that make up a particular language. This includes vocabulary, grammatical rules, and common expressions" (Stevens 138).
    • Speech/parole: "the infinite number of acts of speaking by individual speakers of a language" (Stevens 138). Think about the language quirks you and others have as individuals. This is language in action.
  • Sign = Signifier + Signified (4 July 1911)
    • Signifier: the word itself; the letters you write or the sounds you make when saying this word
    • Signified: "meaning" of the word: this is the ideal (you may want to think a little bit about Platonic ideals here) meant: it is the concept or object you mean when you say the word/signifier
      • This is not exactly the same as the referent, which is the actual thing, not the concept. It is your specific cat Fido, not the concept of a cat.
    • Sign: how the word and meaning combine together.
      • "Signifier and Signified are inextricably linked, like two sides of a sheet of paper; you can't separate them. That is, for an English speaker the word tree brings to mind the image of a tree, and seeing a tree brings to mind the word tree. We view the world through the words available to us" (Stevens 138).
    • "The arbitrary nature of the sign": "There is no necessary connection between signifier and signified . . . . This is why different languages have different words for the same concept (tree vs. arbor) and even different words for animal noises . . .. . Additionally, the way concepts divide the world up is also arbitrary: . .. Different languages conceive of time, familial relations, and other matters differently" (Stevens 139).
    • Value: "The value of a sign comes from its relation to other signs in the language system" (Stevens 139).
    • Paradigm and Syntagm: Saussure describes these as the two axes (i.e. as in x or y-axis on a graph) of language.
      • Syntagms: "These are two or more consecutive units within a language. . .. Saussure's point about syntagms is that there is no clear border between what belongs to language as a collective structure and what is the creation of an individual speaker" (Stevens 139, 140).Think of this as the x-axis of a sentence: is the units and order the words come in. This can also be the sounds within a word and the order in which they come. When you change the order, you change the meaning.
      • Paradigm: this is a grouping of signifiers or signified, which share a defining quality. You can often replace members of a linguistic paradigm with one another and the sentence (the syntagm part of this) would still make sense.
        • For example, if I ask you to fill in the blank, a group of words will come to mind that you associate with one another that because of all the linguistic structures you know would make sense in that blank.
          • The child ate an ______.
        • FYI this term will show up in other theories but with slightly different definitions.
        • This YouTube video, Saussure and Structural Linguistics," gives a good illustration of this at the 3-minute mark.
      • Difference (in French): how we identify something is based on what it is not. "Up" is not "down," for example, and "tall" is relative to what you think is "short."
        • These differences are based around binary oppositions
          • See Lévi-Strauss and Structuralist Anthropology FMI
        • Synchronic linguistics
          • Diachronic vs Synchronic: a linguistic approach that looks at how language changes over time is referred to as diachronic; Saussure looked at a system of relationship between words and how this collectively creates meaning at one point in time, which is referred to as synchronic.
            • Diachrony is also referred to as "Historical Linguistics"

Other Terminology

" . . . the order we see in the world is the order we impose on it" (Tyson 199)

Structuralist Anthropology

French scholar Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908-30) applied these theories to anthropology. Due to anti-Semitic racial laws under Vichy, he could not stay in France for much of World War II, and spent much of that time in New York. There his work was heavily influenced by U.S. anthropologists, such as Franz Boas. Later in the course, we will encounter Jacque Derrida, whose work include a critique of Lévi-Strauss.
 

Key Concepts fro Claude Lévi-Struass (1908-2009)

• binary oppositions: "Studying a variety of cultures, he identifies the underlying binaries that structure classifications systems: male-female, human-animal, clean-unclean, high-low, edible-inedible, black-white, right-left, and so on. ...This notion of binaries is crucial to understanding the transition from structuralism to poststructuralism. While structuralists look at how cultures are constructed upon binary oppositions, poststructuralists look to undo and subvert those binaries" (Stevens 150)

  • FMI see The Savage Mind (1962)

  • Who is a structuralist and who is a poststructuralist? Sometimes it is the same people. Lévi-Strauss and Barthes fall under both categories.

• parole vs langue: see above

• bricoleur: Using Saussure's idea of langue, Lévi-Struass "characterizes members of primitive cultures as bricoleurs, a french word meaning a tinkerer or improvises. While a scientist builds a system based on large concepts, a bricoleur improvises with whatever is at hand. Myth is thus a form of 'bricolage that primitive cultures assemble from structures" (Stevens 149)

  • FMI see "The Structural Study of Myth" (1995)

• mythology and mythemes

  • Lévi-Struass believes that while cultures are different, they can share structures of consciousness, thus seemingly different myths may share an underlying structure, making them ultimate the same myth.

  • Mythemes are the fundamental units of a myth. Think of Saussure's syntagms as discussing units of a sentence or letters/sounds in a word. These are the grammar of myth.

    • To what extent do you agree with this?

• Floating Signifier: a signifier that may hold multiple meanings, especially to different people. Its referent is not set.

Strucutralist Semiotics

Roland Barthes(1915-1980) wrote on many subjects, but perhaps his two most enduring legacies are his work on mythology as well as his concept of the "death of the author." The latter is discussed by Tyson in the Introduction, and I strongly suggest reviewing it (if you want, you can read it here - this is optional).  His work is also associated with post-structuralism, due to shifts in the theoretical foundations of his work.

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Key Concepts from Roland Barthes (1915-1980)

• Semiology, or the science of signs: what Barthes calls his methodology

• intertextuality: "Rather than focus on a single line of authorial meaning in his reading of texts, he emphasizes the 'play' of the reader and the intertextuality of a text, the way in which it forms a part of larger linguistic and cultural structures beyond the control of a single author" (Stevens 151)

  • As Stevens points out, this term was actually coined by Julia Kristeva but is key to Barthes work.

  • Note how the idea of "play" has popped up again.

• "Free play of signs": We will discuss this more when we cover Deconstruction, but this note it now, too.

• Sign System: something (can be linguistic or not; can be singular or a collective) that can be analyzed like a specialized language.

• Index, Icon, & Symbol (see Tyson 206 as well as this handout)

  • Index: a sign whose signifier has a concrete, causal relationship to the signified. e.g. smoke and fire, dark clouds point to rain

  • Icon: sign whose signifier physical resembles the signified, e.g., a picture of you, a literal icon painting

  • Symbol: a sign whose relationship between signifier and signified is arbitrary, something that a group, culture, etc. has decided upon, e.g., medieval Europeans viewing the albatross as a symbol of Christ, whatever the color red symbolizes to you.

"The Death of the Author" (1968)

The key point: "The reader has never been the concern of classical criticism; for it, there is no other man in literature but the one who writes. We are now beginning to be the dupes no longer of such antiphrases, by which our society proudly champions precisely what it dismisses, ignores, smothers or destroys; we know that to restore to writing its future, we must reverse its myth: the birth of the reader must be ransomed by the death of the Author."

Other major moments in the essay:

• Who speaks in a narrative?

  • "In his story Sarrasine, Balzac, speaking of a castrato disguised as a woman, writes this sentence: 'It was WOMAN [emphasis mine], with her sudden fears, her irrational whims, her instinctive fears, her unprovoked bravado, her daring and her delicious delicacy of feeling.' Who is speaking in this way? Is it the story's hero, concerned to ignore the castrato concealed beneath the woman? Is it the man Balzac, endowed by his personal experience with a philosophy of Woman? Is it the author Balzac, professing certain 'literary' ideas of femininity? Is it universal wisdom? or romantic psychology? It will always be impossible to know, for the good reason that all writing is itself this special voice, consisting of several indiscernible voices, and that literature is precisely the invention of this voice, to which we cannot assign a specific origin." (Barthes. Translated by Richard Howard. 1)

• Author as mediator to the divine; Author/God

  • Think of the invocation of the muses in European epic poetry.

  • Why has "capitalist ideology ... accorded the greatest importance to the author's 'person'" (p.1)?

• Is it ironic that Barthes claims that there are author's intending to "topple" the cult of authorial intent (p.2)?

  • Proust's example of a narrator becoming a writer: "Proust ... undertook the responsibility of inexorably blurring, by an extreme subtilization, the relation of the writer and his characters: by making the narrator no the person who has seen or felt, nor even the person who writes, but the person who will write (the young man of the novel -- but, in fact, how old is he, and who is he?--wants to write but cannot, and the novel ends when at last the writing becomes possible" (p. 2).

• "[S]urrealism doubtless could not accord language a sovereign place, since language is a system and since what all the movement sought was, romantically, a direct subversion of codes -- an illusory subversion, moreover, for a code cannot be destroyed, it can only be 'played with'" (p. 3)

  • How does this connect to what you read of Saussure's ideas?

  • Keep that idea of "play" in mind when we get to Deconstruction.

• A fast New Criticism reference (p. 5)

• Who is the reader and why is Barthes trying to recover it (p. 5).

Poststructualism

See Chapter 7

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Structures of Narrative

Russian Formalism

"Rather than treating literary works as mystified works of art emanating from God-like imaginations, they dissected texts as though they were puzzles to be solved. They favored experimental writers with avant-garde-techniques that allowed readers to peer behind the curtain to see how literature gets made" (Stevens 141)

Key Figures and ideas

• Boris Eichenbaum (1886-1959)

  • Poetics: "The study of the technical side of poetry, including rhyme and meter" (Stevens. Glossary. 264)

• Like New Critics, "Russian Formalists did not believe in a distinction between form and content in a work of literature, because they conceived of works of literature as pure form. ... what's being sad cannot be separated from the ways in which it's being said" (Stevens 140), but as you can see from the chart in this section, their scientific approach is very different from a New Critical close reading.

• Viktor Shklovsky (1893-1984)

  • Defamiliarization: Art "makes the familiar seem strange" (qtd Stevens 141).

  • FMI see his "Art as Technique" essay.

• Through the work of Tzvetan Todorov and Julia Kristeva, this methodology became influential to other schools of thought, such as Narratology (see below).

Narratology

This draws heavily from Russian Formalism, but you should see some similarities to the structuralist anthropology of Lévi-Struass.

Keywords in Narratology

• Tzvetan Todorov (b. 1939)

  • Fabula and syuzhet: Fable and Subject (Stevens 153)

    • Russian Formalist: Fable = raw materials of the story (chronological events); Subject = How the author shapes those events.

    • Narratology: The reader engages with the syuzhet/subject: how does the narrative use that to shape the way the story unfolds.

• Mieke Bal (b. 1946)

  • Fabula, story, text: "fabula is still the raw material of the story, including the chronological events and the actors within it. Story then is the events as they're told, the way an author arranges them chronologically, but also how they're presented in terms of point of view. Finally, text refers to the telling of the story, including style and distinction" (Stevens 153).

• Gérard Genette (b. 1930)

  • Focalization

    • In A Very Short Introduction to Literary Theory, Jonathan Culler has a good explanation of this, from which I am drawing.

    • Who Sees?

      • Temporal

      • Distance and Speed

      • Limitations of Knowledge

• • Paratexts: "elements of a text that stand outside the story itself, including prefaces, titles, chapters epigraphs, indexes, and any number of other things" (Stevens 153)

Narrative Form

From Chapter 2:

• Beginning, Middle, End

• Exposition, Rising Action, Climax, Falling Action, Resolution, Denouement

• See also Formalism and the New Critics' concept of organic unity

Related ideas:

Keywords from Northop Frye

• Structures of Genre

  • Mythoi/Mythos and Theory of Myths

  • Mythos of Summer vs. Mythos of Winter

  • Archetype and Archetypal Criticism

  • Theory of modes

NB: I debated where to put Frye: he definitely deals with structures and to some extent agrees with New Critics, but in many ways falls into his own category.

Keywords from A.J Gremias

• Actants

• Plot types

  • Subject-Object (e.g.,stories of quests); Sender-Receiver (e.g. stories of communication), Helper-Opponet (subplots in other stories)

• Contractual Structures, Performative Structures, vs. Disjunctive Structures

Keywords from Gérard Genette

• Paratexts

• Story, Narrative, & Narration

  • Story: events that happen in the order they would happen temporally (not necessarily the order of the book)

  • Narrative: The words on the page: is created by the narrator's act of narration

  • Narration: the act of telling the story to an audience. The author is not necessarily the narrator, nor is the reader necessarily the audience

• Tense: Order, Duration, Frequency

  • Order: relationship between the chronology of the story (linear time within the fictional world) and the narrative (the order events happen in the narrative)

  • Duration: how do time and textual space relate to each other?

  • Frequency: Does the same event occur more than once in the story? in the narrative?

• Mood: Distance, Perspective, Voice