Structuralism

Structuralism is not easy to define; one cannot define structuralism only by looking at how the words have been used. The ones who called themselves structuralists were creating polemic, in a way attracting attention; after the scholarship studies would prove that the common features of everything called structuralist were extremely common indeed (Culler, J.page 3).

Structuralism is a way of thinking about the world which is predominantly concerned with the perception and descriptions of structures. Structuralism claims that the nature of every element in any given situation has no significance by itself, and it is determined by all the other elements involved in that situation. We can not perceive the full significance of any entity unless it is integrated into the structure of which it forms a part (Hawkes, T.p.17-18).

In general, as a philosophical worldview, structuralism is interested in interrelation between units, and rules. What structuralism analysis does is to look at the units of a system, and the rules that make that system work. In language, the units are words and the rules are grammar. In different languages, the grammar rules are different, but the structure is the same for all languages: words combine within a grammatical system and produce meaning. Structuralism analysis situates this system as universal, every human mind in every culture during history has used some sort of structuring principle to organize and understand cultural phenomena (http://www.colorado.edu/klages)

Placing structuralism in the literary criticism, it is an approach to analysing the narrative material by examining the underlying invariant structure. For, example, if a literary critic applied a structuralist literary theory; he would say that the authors of West Side Story were not writing something really new, because their work had the same structure of Shakespeare´s Romeo and Juliet. So, Structuralism literary criticism argues that “the novelty value of a literary text can lie only in new structures, rather that in the specifics of character development and voice in which the structure is expressed” (wikipedia).

Structuralism introduced some terms to the literary criticism: the term of the bricoleur opposed to the engineer, a critic is a bricoleur working with what is to hand; as literary criticism uses language to speak of language use, it is in fact a metaliterature, a literature on a literature; the term of literariness is like formalists would define it, it is language production in which the attention is addressed to spectacle, not to the message; the aspect of literary is close to the New Criticism term ambiguity, it is placed at the heart of the poetic function, its nature puts the message, the addresser and the addressee in doubt. (Genette)

The role of the critic in structuralism is secondary to the writer. The critics treat as signs what the writer is creating as concepts. When a critic reads literature he is reading is as a cultural production constructed according to various elements of the culture. The critic does not ignore the meaning, but treats it as mediated by signs. Post- structuralism will differ in their denial that anything can be transparent; all concepts are constructed of signs. (Genette)

 Structuralism is a theory with such extensive ramifications, that there will be different ways of doing structural analysis. Some approaches are: the study of the basic codes which make narrative possible and make it work, called narratology; the study of the constructions of meaning in texts; study of mimesis, that is the representation of reality; texts are also analyzed for their structures of opposition, binary oppositions; also texts can be analyzes as they represent the codes and conventions of the culture.(Genette).

Some structuralists are: Jean Piaget that in his work Le Structuralisme shows that mathematics, logic, physics, biology and all the social sciences have long been concerned with structure; Lévi-Strauss´s pioneering article, L´analyse structurale en linguistique et en anthropologie.

 But Ferdinand Saussure´s work forms the ground base on which most contemporary structuralist thinking now rests. Saussure contribution to the study of language lies in his Cours de Linguistique Générale. He rejects the substantive view of the subject in favour of a relational one. Language should be studied also in terms of relationship between its individual parts, and synchronically. He also introduced the terms of langue and parole; the distinction between them is the same as between the abstract language system, in English called language, and the individual utterances made by speakers of the language in everyday situations, called speech. (Culler,J.; Hawkes,T.)

In Europe, after Saussure´s death, two centres of linguistic study have developed; they are both important in respect of the growth and expansion of structuralism. The Prague school represented by the work of Trubetskoy, and the formalist Jakobson, and the Copenhagen school represented by the work of Louis Hjelmslev. The varieties of linguistic study: descriptive, functional and glossematic constitute the structuralist modes nowadays. (Hawkes, T.)

So, through structuralism, literature is seen as a whole: its functions as a system of meaning and reference no matter how many words there are. Any work becomes the parole, the individual articulation, of a cultural langue, or system of signification. As literature is not an autonomous system, but it is part of larger structures of signification of the culture (Genette).