STRUCTURALISM
LITERARY THEORY
The first thing you have to get used to when you begin to study
structuralism is that common uses of the word structure do not
necessarily imply structuralist activity.
C For example, you are not
engaged in structuralist activity if you examine the physical structure of
a building to discover if it is physically stable or aesthetically pleasing.
Structuralism
• In terms of literary study, the same model of structuralist activity holds true.
You are NOT engaged in structuralist activity if you describe the structure of a
short story to interpret what the work means or evaluate whether or not it’s
good literature.
• However, you are engaged in structuralist activity if you examine the structure
of a large number of short stories to discover the underlying principles that
govern their composition, for example, principles of narrative progression (the
order in which plot events occur) or of characterization (the functions each
character performs in relation to the narrative as a whole).
• 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.
For structuralism sees itself as a human science whose
effort is to understand, in a systematic way, the fundamental
structures that underlie all human experience and, therefore,
all human behavior and production.
For structuralism, the world as we know it consists of two
fundamental levels— one visible, the other invisible. The visible
world consists of what might be called surface phenomena: all the
countless objects, activities, and behaviors we observe, participate
in, and interact with every day. The invisible world consists of the
structures that underlie and organize all of these phenomena so that
we can make sense of them.
Our ability to construct simple sentences depends on
our internalization, whether or not we are aware of it,
of the grammatical structure subject-verb-object.
Without a structural system to govern
communication, we would have no language at all.
Without structures ourC world would be chaos.
Where do these structures come from?
Structuralists believe they are generated by the human
mind... Our understanding of the world does not result from
our perception of structures that exist in the world. The
structures we think we perceive in the world are actually
innate (inborn) structures of human consciousness,
which we project onto the world in order to be able to deal
with the world.
In conclusion, structuralism sees itself as a science
of humankind, for its efforts to discover the
structures that underlie the world’s surface
phenomena imply an effort to discover
something about the innate structures of
human consciousness.
Structure
Physical entities
C
Conceptual framework
STRUCTURAL LINGUISTICS
Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913)
• A Swiss linguist
• Credited with founding semiotics (he called it
semiology)
• Course in General Linguistics(1916)
Sign
Signs take the form of words, images, sounds, odors,
flavors, acts or objects, but such things have no
intrinsic meaning and become signs only when we
invest them with meaning. 'Nothing is a sign unless it
is interpreted as a sign'
Langue - refers to the whole system of a given
language (its grammar, vocabulary and syntax).
[Structure]
Parole - refers to the individual instance of
utterance that takes place under the framework
of the langue.[Surface phenomena]
The sign has two parts:
Signifier
• It is the psychological imprint of the sound, the impression it makes
on our senses.
• AKA “sound-image”
Signified
• The concept or essence of something the signifier is referring to.
Referent
It is the real object in the real world for which the word or sign is an
arbitrary and conventional signal.
The Arbitrariness of the Sign
• there is no necessary connection between a given sound-
image and the concept to which it refers;
• and there is also no necessary connection between a sign
and its referent.
As Saussure says of the linguistic sign,
‘Its most precise characteristic is to be
what the others are not.’
Difference
• simply means that our ability to identify an entity (such as an
object, a concept, or a sound) is based on the difference we perceive
between it and all other entities.
• According to structuralism, the human mind perceives difference
most readily in terms of opposites, which structuralists call binary
oppositions: two ideas, directly opposed, each of which we
understand by means of its opposition to the other.
The idea that signifiers, or linguistic sound-images, do not refer to things in the
world but to concepts in our mind is crucial for structuralism. As we noted
earlier, structuralists believe that our perceptions of the world result from the
conceptual framework that is an innate feature of human consciousness. We
don’t discover the world; we “create” it according to innate structures within the
human mind. Given that language is the most fundamental of these structures,
and the one through which our beliefs are passed on from one generation to the
next, it makes sense that it is through language that we learn to conceive and
perceive the world the way we do. This is why learning a new language carries
with it the potential to learn to see the world in new ways.
