The Summary of Structuralism
Structuralism is one of the approaches in literary criticism.
STRUCTURALISM
In the 1960s, structuralism is an approach to literary analysis grounded in structural linguistics, the science of language. By using the techniques, methodologies, and vocabulary of linguistics, structuralism offers a scientific view of how we achieve meaning not only in literary works but also in all forms of communication and social behaviour.
HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT
Pre-Saussurean Linguistics
Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, philology, not linguistics, was the science of language. The philologists described, compared, and analyzed the languages of the world to discover similarities and relationships. Their approach to language study was diachronic, that is, they traced language change throughout long expanses of time, discovering how a particular phenomenon such as a word or sound in the language had changed etymologically or phonologically throughout several centuries, and whatever a similar change could be noted in other languages.
Language, they believed, mirrored the structure of the world it imitated and therefore had no structure of its own. Known as the mimetic theory of language, this hypothesis asserts that words (Either spoken or written) are symbols for things in the world, each word having its own referent – the object, concept, or idea that represents or symbolizes that word. According to this theory, the symbol (a word) equals a thing: Symbol (word) = thing.
In the first decade of the 1900s, a Swiss philologist and teacher, Ferdinand de Saussure (1857 – 1913), began questioning these long-held ideas, and by so doing, triggered a reformation in language study. Through his research and innovative theories, Saussure changed the direction and subject matter of linguistic studies. His Course in General Linguistics, a compilation of his 1906 – 1911 lecture notes published posthumously by his students, is one of the seminal works of modern linguistics and forms the basis for structuralist literary theory and practical criticism. Through the efforts of this father of modern linguistics, nineteenth-century philology evolved into the more multifaceted science of twentieth-century linguistics.
Saussure began his linguistic revolution by affirming the validity and necessity of the diachronic approach to language study used by such nineteenth-century philologists as the Grimm brothers and Karl Verner.
Structure of Language
According to Saussure, all languages are governed by their own internal rules which do not mirror or imitate the structure of the world. The basic building block of language is the phenomena-the smallest meaningful (significant) sound in a language.
Although each phenomenon makes a distinct sound that is meaningful and recognizable to speakers of a particular language, in actuality a phoneme is composed of a family of nearly identical speech sounds called allophones.
In addition to phonemes, another major building block of language is the morpheme-the smallest part of a word that has lexical or grammatical significance.
Another major building block in the structure of language is the actual arrangement of words in a sentence or syntax.
Having established the basic building blocks of a sentence - phonemes, morphemes, and syntax – language provides us with one additional body of rules to govern the various interpretations or shades of meaning such combinations of words can evoke: semantics.
Langue and Parole
Prescriptive grammar is the rules of English grammar invented by eighteenth and nineteenth-century purists who believe that there was certain construction that all educated people should know. But in five or six-year-old native speakers of a language have learned, Saussure calls langue, the structure of the language that is mastered and shared by all its speakers.
Whereas langue emphasizes the social aspects of language and an understanding of the overall language system, an individual’s actual speech utterances and writing, Saussure called parole. In other words for Saussure, the proper study of linguistics is a system (langue), not the individual utterances of its speaker (parole).
Saussure’s Redefinition of a Word
Languages must be investigated both diachronically and synchronically, Saussure then re-examined philology’s definition of a word. Rejecting the long-held belief that a word is a symbol that equals a thing, Saussure proposed that words are signs made up of two parts: the signifier (a written or spoken mark) and a signified (a concept): sign = signifier / signified.
Furthermore, the linguistic sign, declares Saussure is arbitrary: the relationship between the signifier (ball) and the signified (the concept of the ball) is a matter of convention.
For Saussure, language is the primary sign system whereby we structure our world. Although semiology never became an important new science as Saussure envisioned, a similar science was being proposed in America almost simultaneously by philosopher and teacher Charles Sanders Peirce. Called semiotics, this science borrowed linguistics methods used by Saussure and applied them to all meaningful cultural phenomena. Distinguishing among the various kinds of signs, semiotics as a field of study continues to develop today. Because it uses structuralist methods borrowed from Saussure, the terms semiotics and structuralism are often used interchangeably, although the former denotes a particular field of study whereas the letter is more an approach and methods of analysis.
Assumptions
Borrowing linguistic vocabulary, theory, and methods from Saussure and to a smaller degree from piercing, structuralists – their studies being variously called structuralism, semiotics, stylistics, and narratology, to name a few – believe that codes, signs, and rules govern all human social and cultural practice, including communication. Structuralists want to discover these codes which they believe give meaning to all our social and cultural customs and behaviour. The proper study of meaning and therefore reality, they assert, is an investigation practice themselves. To discover how all the parts fit together and function is their aim.
The proper study of literature, for the structuralists, involves an inquiry into the conditions surrounding the act of interpretation itself (how literary conveys meaning), not an in-depth investigation of individual work. Because an individual work can express only the values and beliefs of a system of which it is part, structuralists emphasize the system (langue) whereby relate to each other, not an examination of an isolated text (parole). They believe that a study of the system of rules that govern literary interpretation becomes the critic’s primary task.
Such a belief presupposes that the structure of literature is similar to the structure of language. Before structuralism, literary theories discussed the literary conventions-that is, the various genre or types of literature such as the novel, the short story, or poetry. For these structuralist theorists, the proper study of literature was an examination of these conventions and of how individual texts used these conventions to make meaning or how readers use the conventions to interpret the texts. Structuralists, however, seek out the system of codes that they believe convey a text’s meaning. For example, how a symbol or a metaphor imparts meaning is now of special interest. For instance, in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown,” most readers assume that the darkness of the forest requests evil and images of light represent safety.
For the structuralist, how a symbol or any other literary device functions becomes of chief importance, not how literary devices initiate reality or express feelings. By explaining literature as a system of signs encased in a cultural frame that allows that system to operate, no longer, says structuralism, can a literary work be considered a mystical or magical relationship between the author and the reader, the place where author and reader share emotions, ideas, and truth.
Structuralism attempts to strip literature of its magical power or so-called hidden meanings that can be discovered only by a small, elite group f highly-trained specialists.
METHODOLOGIES
Methodologies strategy of structuralism:
Claude Lẻvi-Strauss
One of the first scholars to implement the Saussure principle of linguistic to narrative discourse in the 1950s and 1960s was anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. Attached to the rich symbol in myths, Lévi-Strauss spent years studying many of the world’s myths. Myth, he assumed, possessed a structure like a language. Each individual myth was therefore an example of parole.
The meaning of any individual myth, then, depends on the interaction and order of the mythemes within the story. Out of this structural pattern comes the myth’s meaning.
As we unconsciously master our language’s langue, we also master myth’s structure. Ur ability to grasp this structure, says Lévi-Strauss is innate. Like langue, myths are simply another way we classify and organize our world.
Ronald Barthes
His contributions to structuralist theory are best summed up in the title of his most famous text, s/z. In Balzac’s Sarrasine, Barthes noted that the first s is pronounced as the s in snake and the second as the z in the zoo.
Barthes then applies his assumption that meaning develops through differences in all social contexts, including fashion, familial relations, dining, and literature, to name a few. When applied to literature, an individual text is simply a message-a parole-that must be interpreted by using the appropriate codes or signs or binary operations that form the basis of the entire system, the langue.
Vladimir Propp
A group of structuralists called narratologists began another kind of structuralism, structuralist narratology, the science of narrative. Using this idea at his starting point, Russian linguist Vladimir Propp investigated Russian fairy tales to decode their langue. According to his analysis, which appears in his work The Morphology of the Folktale (1968), all folk or fairy tales are based on 31 fixed elements, or what Propp calls “functions”, which occur in a given sequence.
Tzevtan Tordorov and Gerad Gennete
Another narratologist, Bulgarian Tzevtan Todorov, declares that all stories are composed of grammatical units. By applying a rather intricate grammatical model to the narrative – dividing the texts into semantic, syntactic, and verbal aspects-Todorov believes he can discover the narrative’s langue and establish a grammar of narrative. An individual text (parole) interests Todorov as a means to describe the overall properties of literature in general (langue).
Other narratologists such as Gerard Genette and Roland Barthes have also developed methods of analyzing a story’s structure to uncover its meaning, each building on the former work of another narratologist and adding an additional element or two of his own. Genette, for example, believes that tropes or figures of speech require a reader’s special attention. Barthes on the other hand points us back to Todorov and provides us with more linguistic terminology to dissect a story.
Jonathan Culler
By the mid-1970s, Jonathan Culler become the vice of structuralism in America and took structuralism in yet another direction. In Structuralist Poetics (1975), Culler declared that abstract linguist models used by narratologists tended to focus on parole, spending too much time analyzing individual stories, poems, and novels. What was needed, he believed, was a return to an investigation of langue, Saussure’s main premise.
According to Culler, readers, when given a chance, will somehow make sense of the most bizarre text. Somehow, readers possess literary competence.
In Structuralist Poetics Culler asserts that three elements under a grid of any reading, for instance, of a poem:
A poem should be unified.
It should be thematically significant.
This significance can take the form of reflection in poetry.
A Model of Interpretation
Many structuralists theories abound, a core of structuralists believes is that the primary signifying system is best found as a series of binary oppositions that the reader organizes, values, and then uses to interpret the text.
No matter what is a methodology, structuralism emphasizes form and structure, not the actual content of a text. Although individual texts must be analysed, structuralists are more interested in the rule-governed system that underlies texts than in the texts themselves. How a text’s underlying structural codes combine to produce the text’s meaning rather than a reader’s personal interpretation is structuralism’s chief interest.
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