Structuralism

Structuralism is an intellectual movement which began in France in the 1950s and is first seen in the work of the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss (1908-?) and the literary critic Roland Barthes (1915-1980). 

 It is difficult to boil structuralism down to a single 'bottom-line' proposition, but if forced to do so I would say that its essence is the belief that

“…things cannot be understood in isolation - they have to be seen in the context of the larger structures they are part of”

Hence the term is described as ‘structuralism’. Structuralism was imported into Britain mainly in the 1970sand attained widespread influence, and even notoriety, throughout the 1980s.

If we are confronted with Keats’Ode on a Grecian Urn, as structuralists we must claim that it can only be understood if we first have a clear notion of the genre which it parodies andsubverts. In the case of Keats’ poem the relevant genre is the ‘Ode’, one kind of lyric poem in which the speaker addresses somebody or something to expresses his inner grief and agony. 

But the ode, in turn, can hardly be understood without some notion of the concept of lyric poem. These are just some of the cultural structures which Donne's poem is part of. You will see that your structuralist 'approach' to it is actually taking you further and further away from the text, and into large and comparatively abstract questions of genre, history, and philosophy, rather than closer and closer to it, as the Anglo-American tradition demand

Now if we use the crude analogy of chickens and eggs, we can regard the containing structures (the alba, courtly love, poetry itself as a cultural practice) as the chicken, and the individual example (Donne's poem in this case) as the egg. For structuralists, determining the precise nature of the chicken is the most important activity, while for the liberal humanists the close analysis of the egg is paramount.

Structuralism roots in the thinking of Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913), a Swiss linguist. Saussure concentrated instead on the patterns and functions of language in use today, with the emphasis on how meanings are maintained and established and on the functions of grammatical structures.This can be summarized as three pronouncements in particular. 

Firstly, he emphasised that the meanings we give to words are purely arbitrary, and that these meanings are maintained by convention only. Words, that is to say, are 'unmotivated signs', meaning that there is no inherent connection between a word and what it designates. The word 'hut', for instance, is not in any way 'appropriate' to its meaning, and all linguistic signs are arbitrary likethis. 

Secondly, Saussure emphasised that the meanings of words are (what we might call) relational.That is to say, no word can be defined in isolation from other words. The definition of any given word depends upon its relation with other 'adjoining' words. For example, that word 'hut'depends for its precise meaning on its position in a 'paradigmatic chain', that is, a chain of words related in function and meaning each of which could be substituted for any of the others in a given sentence. The paradigmatic chain in this case might include the following:

hovel           shed            hut              house         mansion              palace

The meaning of any one of these words would be altered if any one of the others were removed from the chain. Thus, 'hut' and 'shed' are both small and basic structures, but they are not quite the same thing: one is primarily for shelter (a night-watchman's hut, for instance), while the other is primarily for storage: 

Thus, we define 'mansion' by explaining how its meaning relates to that of the two words on either side of it. If we have paired opposites then this mutually defining aspect of words is even more apparent: the terms 'male' and 'female', for example, mainly have meaning in relation to each other: each designates the absence of the characteristics included in the other, so that 'male' can be seen as mainly meaning 'not female', and vice versa. 

Thirdly,language constitutes the world; it doesn't just record it or label it. Meaning is always attributed to the object or idea by the human mind, and constructed by and expressed through language: it is not already contained within the thing. Well-known examples of this process would be the choice between paired alternatives like 'terrorist' or 'freedom fighter'. There is no neutral or objective way of designating such a person, merely a choice oftwo terms which 'construct' that person in certain ways.

So Saussure's thinking stressed the way language is arbitrary, relational, and constitutive, and this way of thinking about language greatly influenced thestructuralists, because it gave them a model of a system which is self-contained, in which individual items relate to other items and thus create larger structures.

One other distinction made by Saussure gave structuralists a way of thinking about the larger structures which were relevant to literature. He used the terms langue and parole to signify,respectively, language as a system or structure on the one hand, and any given utterance in that language on the other. 

The scope of structuralism

But structuralism is not just about language and literature.The anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss applied the structuralist outlook to the interpretation of myth. He suggested that the individual tale (the parole) from a cycle of myths did not have a separate and inherent meaning but could only be understood by considering its position in the whole cycle (the langue) and the similarities and difference between that tale and others in the sequence.

The other major figure in the early phase of structuralism was Roland Barthes, who applied the structuralist method to the general field of modern culture. He examined modern France (of the 1950s) from the standpoint of a cultural anthropologist in a little book called Mythologies which he published in France in 1957.

What structuralist critics do

1.  They analyse (mainly) prose narratives, relating the text to some larger containing structure, such as:

(a)  the conventions of a particular literary genre, or

(b)  a network of inter textual connections, or

(c)  a projected model of an underlying universal narrative structure, or

(d)  a notion of narrative as a complex of recurrent patterns or motifs.

2.    They interpret literature in terms of a range of underlying parallels with the structures of language, as described by modern linguistics. For instance, the notion of the 'mytheme', posited by Levi-Strauss, denoting the minimal units of narrative 'sense', is formed on the analogy of the morpheme, which, in linguistics, is the smallest unit of grammatical sense. An example of a morpheme is the 'ed' added to a verb to denote the past tense.

3.    They apply the concept of systematic patterning and structuring to the whole field of Western culture, and across cultures, treating as 'systems of signs' anything from Ancient Greek myths to brands of soap powder

Thus, in the structuralist approach to literature there is a constant movement away from the interpretation of the individual literary work and a parallel drive towards understanding the larger, abstract structures which contain them.Traditional critics, in a word, did not welcome the suggestion that they ought to switch their attention from eggs to chickens. 

This paper is prepared for you by Talim Enam, BA (Hons), MA in English.

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