Structuralist Literary Theory

·         This theory draws from the linguistic theory of Ferdinand de Saussure.

·         Language is a system or structure.

·         This assumes that literature, as an artifact of culture, is modeled on the structure of language.

·         The emphasis of this literary theory is on the “how” a text means, instead of the “what” (of the American New Criticism).

·         Argument: The structure of language produces reality, and meaning is no longer determined by the individual but by the system which governs the individual

·         Aim of Structuralism: to identify the general principles of literary structure and not to provide interpretations of individual texts

·         3 dimensions in the individual literary texts:

Ø  The text as a particular system or structure in itself

Ø  Texts are unavoidably influenced by other texts, in terms of both their formal and conceptual structures; part of the meaning of any text depends on its intertextual relation to other texts

Ø  The text is related to the culture as a whole

·         GENRAL PRINCIPLES:

1.    Meaning occurs through difference

2.    Relations among signs are of two sorts, contiguity and substitutability, the axes of combination and selection

3.    Structuralism notes that much of our imaginative world is structured of, and structured by binary oppositions

4.    Structuralism forms the basis for semiotics

5.    Central too to semiotics is the idea of codes

6.    Some signs carry with them larger cultural meanings

7.    Structuralism introduces the idea of the ‘subject’

8.    The conception of the constructed subject

9.    In the view of structuralism our knowledge of ‘reality’ is not only coded but also conventional

10. There is, then, in structuralism, a coherent connection among the conceptions of reality, the social, the individual, the unconscious

·         Guide Questions in Structuralist Criticism:

Ø  What are the elements of the work? How can these be seen as a revealing difference?

Ø  How do the characters, narrators, speakers, or other voices heard in the work reveal difference?

Ø  How do the elements of the work’s plot or overall action suggest a meaningful pattern? What changes, adjustments, transformations, shifts of tone, attitude, or feeling do you find?

Ø  How are the work’s primary images and events related to one another? What elements of differentiation exist, and what do they signify?

Ø  What system of relations could be used to link this work with others of its kind?

Ø  What system of relations could be used to link this work with different kinds of things with which it shared some similarities?

·         Conclusion

The structuralists‟ basic approaches to the interpretation of texts differ. Most structuralists consider the binary opposition as the ideal way of interpretation and textual analysis. Others like the genetic structuralists advance the argument that the text be patterned according to its own internal laws of organic growth. Claude Levi Strauss has actually applied the „binary‟ or „useful opposition‟ in his seminal analysis of myths. Eagleton has also used it in analyzing stories, meaning that structuralism can be applied to the interpretation of all kinds of cultural production. DiYanni (2000) even went further to present checklist for the structuralist interpretation of texts. He has also applied binary opposition in his interpretation of a short story.

It is very clear from the various opinions, views and positions of its leading theorists and the numerous critical perspectives that there is certainly no single structuralism as a theory of literature. What obtains is a range of theoretical positions and arguments, all in support of the idea that the literary text which is a product of language remains the final arbiter rather than the author or the social circumstances surrounding the production of the cultural product. The positions are as many as the analysis and interpretation of the text. Some even go contrary to one another. Some positioned that the author is dead and the reader should be dismissed. Saussure and his closest disciples are of the view that the text shall be analyzed and interpreted as part of a larger structure and which determines its worth as literary work. There are others who slightly differ because they are of the view that the literary text can be analyzed and interpreted in itself as an autonomous structure- different items of a given text, poetry, short story can be considered as structures.