In the past few decades, the growing influence of structuralism, and later post-structuralism and deconstruction, has in a major way changed the world of literature and literary criticism. This essay will trace the evolution of a number of major structuralist keywords, and show how they relate to, or are even born out of, one another.

Structuralism itself, of course, originates from semiotics (or semiology), which was first introduced almost in passing by the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. The two concepts introduced by him that are most important to structuralism, undoubtedly, are that of the sign, split into signifier and signified, and the separation of what we usually call language into two distinct parts, langue and parole, that is, into the more or less abstract rules which govern language, and the actual acts of speech we produce in order to communicate, which will put langue to practical use, but may also break its rules, thus reducing intellegibility.

People studying this concept were quick to note that this two-fold system could not be applied only to the use of human language, but also to many other fields in which communication, more or less obviously, takes place. In an introductory essay into this field, Barthes remarks: "as signifying systems (outside of language, strictly speaking), we may cite: food, clothing, film, fashion, literature" ("Literature Today" 152). The term 'signifying systems' here reminds us of the other major Saussurean concept, that of the sign, through which it is that meaning is communicated. We therefore find that the tools of analysis Saussure offers us are fit to deal with both literary and non-literary acts of parole. Another way to put this is to introduce a revised definition for the concept of 'text', for example "a text is a combination of signs" (Thwaites 67), which still holds true for the special case of literary texts, where the (first-order) signs are represented through letters and words as their signifiers, but also in a wider sense for those areas indicated by Barthes, and many others. Paragraph 3

This re-definition of the text -- the first of the major keywords -- is one of the founding stones of structuralism. It gains its importance through the fact that, for Saussure, signs do not simply have a meaning (or: a value) all by themselves, but only through their contrast to other signs. Moreover, that meaning may also be different depending on the reader (receiver, adressee, ...).

The consequences for literature, and more so for literary criticism, are enormous, of course. Scholes shows that this means "there is no single 'right' reading for any complex literary work" (Scholes 144), or even for any work, complex or not, literary or otherwise. The plurality of meaning that is inevitably connected with signs means that the text which the signs are constituting "is multiple. In approaching a text of any complexity, then, the reader must choose to emphasise certain aspects which seem to him crucial. This is a matter of personal judgment" (Scholes 144).

This established a direct challenge to existing literary criticism. So far, it had mostly ignored any multiplicity of meaning, and assumed some kind of fixed meaning, intended by the author, to be present in a work, which then only needed to be brought to the surface. Now, structuralism claimed that "meaning is never simply folded into a work (implicated) so that it can then be unfolded (explicated) by a technician of language processes" (Scholes 147). As Eagleton remarks, "traditional criticism had sometimes reduced the literary work to little more than a window on to the author's psyche, structuralism seemed to make it a window on to the universal mind. The 'materiality' of the text itself, its detailed linguistic processes, was in danger of being abolished" (Eagleton 112). What, then, should be the goal of literary criticism at all?

A possible solution to this important question is offered by Culler. He sees the danger: "any critic who claims to offer more than a purely personal and idiosyncratic response to a text is claiming that his interpretation derives from operations of reading that are generally accepted" ("Structuralism and Literature" 66). Clearly, to seek, or just imagine, any such all-inclusive consensus (all-inclusive both horizontally -- including all members of the reading community -- and vertically -- including all critical ideas applied by the critic) would be foolish. However, Culler hopes to find at least a not-too-low common denominator between critic and other readers of a work, so that they might at least be able to agree on the general critical approach, if not all the conclusions drawn, since otherwise there would indeed be no point at all to a literature that had an entirely different meaning to each individual reader: "what I am asking is that we try to grasp more clearly this common basis of reading and thus to make explicit the conventions which make literature possible" ("Structuralism and Literature" 66).

The next important and direct consequence of structuralism, then, is the increase in importance of the reader, any reader -- their construction of meaning out of a given text is, after all, just as valid as any critic's --, and structuralist thinkers are thus also much more concerned with the way we read. Scholes, following Tzvetan Todorov's ideas, finds that "reading approaches the literary work as a system and seeks to clarify the relationships among its various parts. ... Reading is a systematised commentary" (Scholes 144). Again, this chips away at the distinguished position critics used to have among 'normal' readers. Eagleton elaborates: "in the terminology of reception theory, the reader 'concretises' the literary work ... . The process of reading, for reception theory, is always a dynamic one, a complex movement and unfolding through time. The literary work itself exists merely as ... a set of 'schemata' or general directions, which the reader must actualise" (Eagleton 76-7). It is at this point, too, that the notion of the 'death of the author' begins to be introduced, of which more will have to be said later. When Barthes remarks that "the reader or critic shifts from the role of consumer to that of producer" (paraphrased in Eagleton 137), this new-found producer obviously begins to occupy the space previously assigned to the 'producer' of traditional models -- the author.

A corollary of the new importance of reading and the plurality of meaning is the now less privileged role of the critic, as has been hinted at a number of times already. Barthes describes texts as "a seamless weave of codes and fragments of codes, through which the critic may cut his own errant path" (paraph. in Eagleton 138) -- and this "own path", as one of many possible readings, shows how vulnerable to attack, to disagreeing, critics have become through structuralism. Contrary to earlier critical models, the argument over a text's meaning is not won anymore by the critic most familiar with the text's author and the circumstances of its creation -- the argument cannot even be decided anymore. This, too, is a direct result of Saussure's statement that signs (the basic elements of texts) have meaning only through their differences, and that that meaning may vary for different people.

Another major area that structuralism has been focusing on -- and which has been overlooked or even virtually ignored by previous schools of criticism -- has been the research into what enters into our reading of any text, apart from the actual text itself. After all, when we read, our perception of the text is shaped by a multitude of factors, ranging from the apparently trivial, such as a text's layout or our own current personal feelings, to the literary, for example prior knowledge about the work or its author -- although strictly speaking any such distinction into 'trivial' or 'literary' is useless since neither is privileged over the other, and the force they wield is not at all related to their 'literariness'.

In describing the process, Derrida finds it useful to draw from Lévi-Strauss's concept of bricolage, which also appears to turn the reader into a much more active participant than the one who just lets themselves be influenced by all manner of extratextual factors (which are themselves texts), as described above:

The bricoleur, says Lévi-Strauss, is someone who uses 'the means at hand', that is, the instruments he finds at his disposition around him, those which are already there, which had not been especially conceived with an eye to the operation for which they are to be used and to which one tries by trial and error to adapt them, not hesitating to change them whenever it appears necessary, or to try several of them at once, even if their form and their origin are heterogeneous. ("Structure, Sign, and Play" 185)

Clearly, this more active participation is reserved only for readers who have made themselves realise where the 'instruments' they use in reading are really coming from. However, Derrida also offers a less exclusive definition: "if one calls bricolage the necessity of borrowing one's concepts from the text of a heritage which is more or less coherent or ruined, it must be said that every discourse is bricoleur" ("Structure, Sign, and Play" 285). If this approach is accepted, it makes no difference anymore whether we are bricoleurs consciously or subconsciously.

In addition to this concept, which we will soon see as a basis for the idea of intertextuality, Barthes introduces the notion that texts vary in the degree to which they let the reader enter into this creation of meaning from both the text and extratextual factors. On the opposite ends of the scale, he places what he calls 'writerly' and 'readerly' texts. Of these, the readerly (or lisible) text regards itself as having only one fixed meaning. Their reader "is left with no more than the freedom either to accept or reject the text" (S/Z 4). Any technical manual is a valid example. Saying that such a text is readerly, however, should not be confused with claiming it really only has one fixed meaning: any such claim could be refuted quickly by pointing out that a technical manual, for example, may also be read by its mere existence to be a sign of our society's attitudes towards technology, and so on. The real meaning of the attribute 'readerly', then, is that the text does not easily yield itself to any interpretation other than the surface one, and that additional work needs to be done to establish such an oppositional reading.

(The amount of work necessary can, incidentally, be shown to be directly related to the extent of the oppositionality of the reading attempted. The relation becomes obvious from examining the amount of opposition to the deconstructive criticism of Jacques Derrida and his followers, whose very method it is to point out the fallacies of a -- not necessarily readerly -- work by starting from a minute contradiction and then gradually expanding the criticism to finally encompass the entire work.)

Writerly texts, of course, offer the reader more choice, and try much less to push them in one or the other direction. Hawkes summarises Barthes's ideas somewhat enthusiastically (and rightly so, since only writerly texts make a critic's work enjoyable): writerly (scriptible) literature "invites us self-consciously to read it, to 'join in' and be aware of the interrelationship of the writing and reading, and ... accordingly offers us the joys of co-operation, co-authorship (and even, at its intensest moments, of copulation)" (Hawkes 114). Emphasising the idea of plurality of meaning, Eagleton, more soberly, describes what makes the difference: "the 'writable' text ... has no determinate meaning, no settled signifieds, but is plural and diffuse, an inexhaustible tissue or galaxy of signifiers" (Eagleton 138). As "inexhaustible" as this "galaxy", thus, is the number of possible meanings a text can take for different readers. Clearly, the writerly text is therefore much preferred: "why is the writerly our value? Because the goal of literary work (of literature as a work) is to make the reader no longer a consumer, but a producer of the text" (S/Z 4).

In effect, this then completely removes the location of meaning from the text, and places it entirely with the reader, who thus becomes more than 'just' reader: "the more plural the text, the less it is written before I read it" (S/Z 10), as Barthes says in S/Z, which means the reader really also writes the text -- "the writerly text is ourselves writing" (S/Z 5). Again, this completely reduces the author to simply the physical producer of the work, taking away any authority to determine the text's meaning. The author, then, is only another reader of the text, and their idea of the text's meaning is just as valid as anyone else's -- no more, but no less, either.

To the same extent that the role of the author is thus diminished, that of the work gains prominence. As Hawkes points out, it comes to include the judgments, opinions and attitudes people have towards it -- "a work of literature ultimately consists of everything that has been said about it. As a result, no work ever 'dies'" (Hawkes 157). This, finally, approaches the next major structuralist keyword: intertextuality. In Structuralist Poetics, Culler defines it as "the relation of a particular text to other texts. ... A work can only be read in connection with or against other texts, which provide a grid through which it is read and structured" (Structuralist Poetics 139). The central structuralist observation, that we arrive at the meaning of a text by bringing together both text and context (context here in the widest sense), is now fully made, and can be put into words: "meaning is a continual shuttling back and forth between the language of the work and a network of contexts which are not in the work but are essential for its realisation" (Scholes 147).

The experience of an all-pervading intertextuality cannot simply be confined to the side of the reader, though. Partly, this can already be deduced from the point made earlier that the author turns out to be in effect nothing more than another reader of their work. Hughes hints at this finding somewhat obscurely by emphasising the unavoidable presence of intertextuality in all acts of writing, and thus all texts -- "we can never now use words as if literature had never existed. ... Most works of literature, in emitting messages that refer to themselves, also make constant reference to other works of literature. ... No 'text' can ever be completely 'free' of other texts. It will be involved in ... the intertextuality of all writing" (Hughes 144); Culler makes the idea much clearer by directly attacking the notion that all structuralist work is done when the author is reduced to relative meaninglessness (in truly all senses of the word): "to say that a poem becomes an autonomous object once it leaves the author's pen is, in one sense, precisely the reverse of the structuralist position. The poem cannot be created except in relation to other poems and conventions of reading" (Structuralist Poetics 30). While not anymore involved in determining their work's meaning, the author thus at least is pointed out as the main focal point of the intertextuality flowing into the creation process of a text.

With this amount of intertextuality involved on the sides of both author and reader, its importance cannot be emphasised enough. Quite simply, we find that "all literary texts are woven out of other literary texts, ... every word, phrase or segment is a reworking of other writings which precede or surround the individual work. ... All literature is intertextual" (Eagleton 138). Once this is realised, it becomes clear that any hope to find the meaning of a work must be in vain.

Along the way, we have also lost the only theoretical authority whose help we might have hoped for in determining that meaning -- "the work cannot be sprung shut, rendered determinate, by an appeal to the author, for the 'death of the author' is a slogan that modern criticism is now confidently able to proclaim" (Eagleton 138). One such proclamation, again marking the radical and complete departure from traditional criticism, comes again from Roland Barthes: "writing is not the communication of a message which starts from the author and proceeds to the reader; it is specifically the voice of reading itself: in the text, only the reader speaks" (S/Z 151).

This 'death' of the author, which has been pronounced with good reason, as has been shown, has also led to some misunderstanding concerning the attention that should be paid to the person of a work's (physical) creator. Particularly among deconstructionist critics, as members of the comparatively youngest critical school to in any way take root in Saussurean thought almost inevitably also the most radical, there has been the conclusion that any information at all about the author should be ignored. Barbara Johnson points out the flaw in this position: "to say, as Derrida has said, that there is nothing outside the text is not to say that the reader should read only one piece of literature in isolation from history, biography, and so on. It is to say nothing can be said to be not a text, subject to the différance, the nonimmediacy, of presence or meaning" (Johnson 14). 'Nothing outside the text' thus refers not to an all-exclusive text which holds all the answers within and can stand all by itself, but rather to the all-inclusive edifice of literature (or really of all texts, literary or not) which the text is not only part of, but which through intertextuality also simultaneously is part of the text.

As Derrida points out in "Différance", that edifice can even be expanded to accommodate texts which have not even been created yet, since existing texts already carry 'traces' of them inside -- simply put, this is the 'reverse' direction of intertextuality which Culler also points out as the precondition enabling a future work to be created (Structuralist Poetics 30, qtd. above). Barbara Johnson's commentary of course also ties in with that other point made by Culler that a complete destruction of the link between author and work actually is an offence against structuralist ideas, as quoted above, as it thus ignores one half of the effects of intertextuality -- those present in the work's creation.

To focus now on the other side of intertextuality -- that which is active while we are reading a text --, it is worthwhile to examine how we carve our way through the multitude of possible meanings extractable from any given text, and what becomes of the meaning we arrive at. Here, structuralism finds that we mostly channel the meanings we construct into one of numerous, or perhaps even innumerable, discourses already present in society: "to assimilate or interpret something is to bring it within the modes of order which culture makes available, and this is usually done by talking about it in a mode of discourse which a culture takes as natural. This process goes by various names in structuralist writing: recuperation, naturalisation, motivation, vraisemblablisation" (Structuralist Poetics 137). The "usually" among Culler's words should be well noted here, since in rare cases a text (or a number of texts) and the meanings people construct out of it may in fact create a new mode of discourse -- structuralism and semiotics themselves are, of course, prime examples. The axiom holds, though, that any meaning will be channelled into a mode of discourse, even if it may be a previously non-existing one as in this case.

That we are thus forced to conform, to obey existing rules at least to some extent, is not all too surprising. On the one hand, as members of society we have simply undergone a life-long conditioning to behave this way, that is, socially; on the other hand, what alternative do we have? None, according to Derrida: "a subject who supposedly would be the absolute origin of his own discourse and supposedly would construct it 'out of nothing', 'out of whole cloth', would be the creator of the verb, the verb itself" ("Structure, Sign, and Play" 285). And that verb could not even be passed on without pre-existing discourse -- clearly, down this road there would lie utter unintellegibility.

Discourse is not a one-way street, either, though: not only do texts (or more precisely, the meanings made from them) enter into an existing mode of discourse, their shape is also influenced, if not determined, by discourse -- "language, transcending the individual, imprints the text with the community's values" (Fowler 86), values which enable the text to participate in a certain mode of discourse.

With this much importance placed on discourse (which in itself can be seen as an extension of the already powerful intertextuality), a more stringent definition of this last major concept of structuralism is needed. Barthes merely sees it as an extension of speech (now including a set of values to be expressed), a "combination thanks to which the speaking subject can use the code of the language with a view to expressing his personal thought" (Elements of Semiology 15) -- drawing here directly from Saussure --; other definitions are more precise: "a discourse is a set of textual arrangements which organises and co-ordinates the actions, positions and identities of the people who produce it" (Thwaites 135), or "discourse is the property of language which mediates the interpersonal relationships which must be carried by any act of communication" (Fowler 52). Discourse, thus, does nothing less than enable us to function as parts of our society; an absence of discourse would mean the absence of language itself.

Discourse is never static, either. As language is constantly changing through being unceasingly in use, so is discourse. it is found to be involved in a circular process: any text entering a discourse by contributing to it also slightly alters the path of that discourse, and the discourse's central values, thus altered, are in turn influential through intertextuality in the creation of new texts, which then again enter the discourse, modifying it, and so on ad infinitum. For Scholes, commenting on Todorov, this finding apparently was so important that he had to point it out, with only slightly different wording, twice: "every literary text is the product of a pre-existing set of possibilities, and it is also a transformation of those possibilities", and "each literary text is at once a product of pre-existing categories and a transformation of the whole system" (Scholes 128 and 145). Perhaps this emphasis is justified by the pervasive character and thus ubiquitous influentiality of discourse in society.

This pervasive character it is, too, that makes that latest major semiotic and critical approach, deconstruction, possible in the first place: the apparently minor flaws in reasoning on which Derridaean deconstructivist criticism centres at the start, and based upon which it embarks on a course at the end of which stands the critique of the entire work, can be seen to have been planted not simply through carelessness on part of the writer, but rather by the prevailing values of the discourse the work is set to enter, which work against any new notions the work may aim to introduce. Thus Derrida, for example, was able to criticise Saussure for preferring speech to writing in his analyses, but frequently retreating to writing to make a point: Saussure's mistake was not so much simply to have been this inconsequential, but rather not to have been aware of the discourse he was about to enter, the prevailing conditions of which (most significantly a need for scientific texts to be visual, and thus, in writing) almost forced him to make that mistake.

If it has not been already, here then is the point where it is most obvious that structuralism has long since departed from the limitations of being 'only' a school of literary criticism, and has become, rather, a starting point for -- among others -- sociological and philosophical theories. Eagleton makes this clear beyond doubt: "discourses ... produce effects, shape forms of consciousness and unconsciousness, which are closely related to the maintenance or transformation of our existing systems of power. They are thus closely related to what it means to be a person" (Eagleton 210).

References

Roland Barthes. Elements of Semiology. New York: Hill and Wang, 1967.
---. "Literature Today". Critical Essays. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1972.
---. S/Z. New York: Hill and Wang, 1974.
Jonathan Culler. Ferdinand de Saussure. Revised ed. Ithaca, New York: Connell UP, 1986.
---. "Structuralism and Literature". Contemporary Approaches to English Studies. Ed. Hilda Schiff. London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1977.
---. Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism Linguistics and the Study of Literature. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975.
Jacques Derrida. "Différance". Speech and Phenomena, and Other Essays on Husserl's Theory of Signs. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1973.
---. Of Grammatology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1976.
---. "Structure, Sign, and Play". Writing and Difference. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1978.
Terry Eagleton. Literary Theory: an Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell, 1983.
Roger Fowler. Linguistics and the Novel. London: Methuen, 1977.
Terence Hawkes. Structuralism and Semiotics. Berkeley: U of California P, 1977.
Barbara Johnson. A World of Difference. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1987.
Ferdinand de Saussure. Course in General Linguistics. London: Duckworth, 1983.
Robert Scholes. Structuralism in Literature: an Introduction. New Haven: Yale UP, 1975.
Tony Thwaites, Lloyd Davis, Warwick Mules. Tools for Cultural Studies. South Melbourne: Macmillan, 1994.

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