STRUCTURALISM

INTRODUCTION
Flourishing in the 1960s, structuralism is an approach to literary analysis grounded in
structural linguistics, the science of language. By utilizing the techniques, methodologies,
and vocabulary of linguistics, structuralism offers a scientific view of how we achieve
meaning not only in literary works hut in all forms of rnmmunication and social behavior^

To understand structuralism, we must trace its historical roots to the linguistic writings and
theories of Ferdinand de Saussure, a Swiss professor and linguist of the late nineteenth and
early twentieth century. It is his scientific investigations of language and language theory
that provide the basis for structuralism's unique approach to literary analysis.
HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT
Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, philology, not linguistics, was
the science of language. Its practitioners, 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 through long expanses
of time, investigating, for example, how a particular phenomenon in one language had
changed through several centuries and whether a similar change could be noted in other
languages. Using a cause-and-effect relationship as the basis for their research, the
philologists' main emphasis was the historical development of all languages.
MIMETIC THEORY OF LANGUAGE
Emphasis on historical development reflected the nineteenth-century
philologists' theoretical assumptions about the nature of language.
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 are symbols for things in the
world, each word having its own referent -the object, concept, or idea that
represents and/or symbolizes a word. According to this theory, the symbol
(the word) equals a thing.
FERDINAND DE SASSURE
Course in General Linguistics, a compilation of Ferdinand de Sassure’s
1906-11 lecture notes published posthumously by his students, is one of
the seminal works of modem linguistics and forms the basis for much
twentieth-century 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.
SYNCHRONIC APPROACH
While affirming the validity and necessity of the diachronic approach to language study
utilized by nineteenth-century philologists, Saussure introduced the synchronic approach,
focusing attention on studying a language at one particular time in its evolution and
emphasizing how the language functions- not its historical development By highlighting the
activity of language and how it operates, rather than its evolution, Saussure drew attention to
the nature and composition of language and its constituent parts. This new concern
necessitated a rethinking of language theory and a reevaluation of the aims of language
research, and finally resulted in Saussure's articulating the basic principles of modem
linguistics.
REJECTION OF THE MIMETIC THEORY

Unlike many other linguists of his time, Saussure rejected the mimetic theory of
language structure. In its place, he asserted that language is primarily
determined by its own internally structured and highly systematized rules,,
These rules govern all aspects of a language, including the sounds its speakers
will identify as meaningful, various combinations of these sounds into words,
and how these words may be arranged to produce meaningful communication
within a given language.
LANGUE
By age five or six, native speakers of a language have consciously and unconsciously
mastered their language's system of rules—the rules that enable them to participate in
language communication. Although they may not have obviously mastered the advanced
elements of their language's grammar, native speakers of English, for instance, would
immediately know that the utterance Alice looked up into the sky was an acceptable
English sentence, but the word combination Alice up the book is somehow incorrect or
violates English sentence structure. What this speaker has learned Saussure dubs langue,
the structure of the language that is mastered and shared by all its speakers.
PAROLE
While langue emphasizes the social aspect of language, an individual's actual
speech utterances Saussure calls parole A speaker can generate countless
examples of individual utterances, but these will all be governed by the
language's system, its langue. It is the task of the linguist, Saussure believes, to
infer a language's langue from the analysis of many instances of parole. In
other words, for Saussure the proper study of linguistics is the system (langue)
not the individual utterances of its speakers (parole).
SIGNIFIER AND SIGNIFIED
Having established that languages are systems that operate according to
verifiable rules and that they need to be investigated both diachronically and
synchronically, Saussure then reexamined philology's definition of a word.
Rejecting the long-held belief that a word is a symbol that equals a thing (its
referent), Saussure proposed that words are signs made up of two parts: the
signifier (a written or spoken mark) and a signified (a concept). According to
Saussure , a word does not represent a referent in the objective world but a
concept in our minds.
RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN SIGNIFIER AND THE SIGNIFIED

Furthermore, the linguistic sign, declares Saussure, is arbitrary. The relationship

between the signifier (e.g. ball) and the signified (the concept of ball) is a matter
of convention. The speakers of a language have simply agreed that the written
or spoken sounds or marks represented by ball will equal the concept ball. With
few exceptions, proclaims Saussure, there is no natural link between the
signifier and the signified, nor is there any natural relationship between the
linguistic sign and what it represents.
SEMIOLOGY
Saussure proposed a new science called semiology that would study how we
create meaning through these signs in all our social behavioral systems. Since
language was the chief and most characteristic of all these systems, Saussure
declared, it was to be the main branch of semiology. The investigation of all
other sign systems would be patterned after language, for like language's signs,
the meaning of all signs was arbitrary, conventional, and differential.
SEMIOTICS
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 linguistic methods utilized by Saussure and
applied them to all meaningful cultural phenomena. Meaning in society, this
science of signs declares, can be systematically studied, both in terms of how
this meaning occurs and in terms of the structures that allow it to operate.
ASSUMPTIONS
Borrowing their linguistic vocabulary, theory, and methods from Saussure and to a smaller
degree from Peirce, structuralists—their studies being variously called structuralism, semiotics,
stylistics, or narratology—believe that codes, signs, and rules govern all human social and
cultural practices, including communication. Whether that communication is the language of
fashion as exhibited in the story at the beginning of this chapter, or the language of sports,
education, friendship, or literature, each is a systematized combination of codes (signs)
governed by rules. Structuralists wish to discover these codes, which they believe give meaning
to all our social and cultural customs and behavior. The proper study of meaning and therefore
reality, they assert, is an investigation of the system behind these practices, not the individual
practices themselves. To discover how all the parts fit together and function is their aim.
GRAMMAR
The proper study of literature, for the structuralists, now involves an inquiry into the conditions
surrounding the act of interpretation itself (how literature conveys meaning), not an in-depth
investigation of an individual work. Since an individual work can express only those values and
beliefs of the system of which it is a part, structuralists emphasize the system (langue) whereby
texts relate to each other, not an examination of an isolated text (parole). They believe that a study
of the grammar, or 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. Like language, say the structuralists, literature is a self-enclosed system of rules that is
composed of language. And also like language, literature needs no outside referent but its own
rule governed but socially constrained system.
DEMYSTIFICATION OF LITERATURE
In addition to emphasizing the system of literature and not individual texts,
structuralism also claims it demystifies literature. 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 to represent
mystical or magical relationship between the author and the reader, the place
where author and reader share emotions, ideas, and truth. An objective
analysis of how readers interpret texts, not a transcendental or intuitive
response to any one text, leads to meaning.
INTERTEXTUALITY
Similarly, an author's intentions can no longer be equated with the text's overall meaning, for meaning
is determined by the system that governs the writer, not by an individual author's own quirks. And no
longer can the text be autonomous, an object whose meaning is contained solely within itself. All texts,
declare structuralists, are part of a shared system of meaning that is intertextual, not text specific; that
is, all texts refer readers to other texts. Meaning, claim the structuralists, can therefore be expressed
only through this shared system of relations.

Examples of intertextuality:

• He was lying so obviously, you could almost see his nose growing.

• He’s asking her to the prom. It’s like a happy version of Romeo and Juliet.

• It’s hard being an adult! Peter Pan had the right idea.
STRIPPING MAGICAL POWERS
Declaring both isolated text and author to be of little importance, structuralism
attempts to strip literature of its magical powers or so-called hidden meanings
that can only be discovered by a small, elite group of highly trained specialists.
Meaning can be found, it declares, by analyzing the system of rules that
comprise literature itself.
METHODOLOGY
Like all other approaches to textual analysis, structuralism follows neither one
methodological strategy nor one set of ideological assumptions. Although most
structuralists use many of Saussure's ideas in formulating their theoretical assumptions
and the foundations for their literary theories, how these assumptions are employed when
applied to textual analysis varies greatly.
LEVI-STRAUSS
One of the first scholar/researchers to apply Saussure's principles of linguistics
to narrative discourse was the anthropologist Claude Levi- Strauss. Attracted to
the rich symbols in myths, Levi-Strauss spent years studying many of the
world's myths. Myth, he assumed, possessed a structure like language. Each
individual myth was therefore an example of parole. What he wanted to
discover was myth's langue, or the overall structure that allows individual
examples (parole) to function and have meaning.
MYTHEMES
After reading countless myths, Levi-Strauss identified recurrent themes running through all of them.
These basic-structures, which, he called mythemes were similar to the primary building blocks of
language . the individual meaningful sounds of a language called phonemes. Like phonemes, these
mythemes find meaning in and through their relationships within the mythic structure. The rules
that govern how these mythemes may be combined constitute myth's structure or grammar. The
meaning of any individual myth, then, depends on the interaction and order of the mythemes
within the story. Out of this structural pattern will come the myth's meaning.

Like our unconscious mastery of our language's langue, we also master myth's structure. Our ability
to grasp this structure, says Levi-Strauss is innate. Like language, myths are simply another way we
classify and organize our world..
NARRATOLOGY
Expanding Levi-Strauss's linguistic model of oral myths to cover a variety of written
stories, a group of structuralists called narratologists began another kind of
structuralism: narratology or structuralist narratology, the science of narrative. Like
Saussure and Levi-Strauss, these structuralists illustrate how a story's meaning
develops from its overall structure, its langue, rather than from each individual
story's isolated theme. The Russian linguist Vladimir Propp, for example, investigated
fairy tales and decoded their langue. According to his analysis, all folk or fairy tales
are based on 31 fixed elements that will occur in sequence. Any story may use any
number of these elements, but each element will occur in its proper sequence.
GRAMMAR OF NARRATIVE
Another narratologist, the Bulgarian Tzvetan Todorov. declares that all stories are
composed of grammatical units. For Todorov, the syntax of narrative—how the
various grammatical elements of a story combine—is essential. By applying a
grammatical model to narrative, Todorov believes he can discover the narrative's
langue. Establishing a grammar of narrative, Todorov decrees that the
grammatical clause, and, in turn, the subject and verb, is the basic interpretative
unit of each sentence and can be linguistically analyzed and further dissected into
a variety of grammatical categories to show how all narratives are structured.
JONATHAN CULLER
By the mid-1970s, Jonathan Culler became the voice of structuralism in America and took

structuralism in another direction. In his work Structuralist Poetics, Culler declared that abstract

linguistic 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. Unlike other structuralists, Culler presents a What, he asks, is the

internalized system of literary competence readers use to interpret a work? In other words, how do

they read? What system guides them through the process of interpreting the work, of making sense

of the spoken or printed word?

BINARY OPPOSITIONS
Still others believe 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. Each
binary operation can be pictured as a fraction, the top half (the numerator) being what
is more valued than its related bottom half (the denominator). Accordingly, in the
binary operation "light/dark" the reader has learned to value light over dark, and in the
binary operation "good/evil" the reader has similarly valued good over evil. How the
reader organizes the various binary operations found within the text but already
existing in the mind of the reader will determine for that particular reader the text's
interpretation.
CHIEF INTEREST OF STRUCTURALISTS
No matter what its methodology, structuralism emphasizes form and structure,
not actual content of a text. Although individual texts must be analyzed,
structuralists are more interested in the rule-governed system that underlies
texts rather than in the texts themselves. How texts mean, not what texts
mean, is their chief interest.