DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH - willingdoncollege.inwillingdoncollege.in/pdf/StudyMaterial/English/6_Structuralism.pdf · in the process of evaluating literature. ... ‘poetics’ that studies

S T R U C T U R A L I S M

Presentation by

Prof. AKHALAQ TADE

COORDINATOR, NAAC & IQAC

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH

WILLINGDON COLLEGE

SANGLI – 416 415 (Maharashtra, INDIA)

New Criticism was a reaction against the older philological, historical and biographical approach to literary work of art. New Criticism compelled the reader to pay closer attention to the text instead of collecting information about the text and its author. New Critics felt that reader and his response to the text should be given more priority and importance than to the intention of the writer. The result of these logics caused the disappearance of the author as well as of his intention, ultimately causing the exaltation of the text.

Prof. Akhalaq Tade, Willingdon College,

Sangli (Maharashtra,India)

The first reaction to the New Criticism came in 1940s. It was Northrop Frye who suggested change in thinking.



Northrop Frye suggested a transition from the New Criticism to Structuralism and Post-structuralist Criticism through what he called the Archetypal Criticism. While the interest of the New Critics was in semantics and verbal complexity, the curiosity of the structuralist was more in the system of conventions underlying the works of art.



Structuralism is a movement by a group of French writers and their American counterparts who used the linguistic concepts provided by the Swiss linguist, Ferdinand de Saussure in his Course in General Linguistics published in 1915. Structuralism is a certain mode of analysis of cultural artifacts based on the methods of contemporary linguistics.



Course in General Linguistics (1915)



It is believed that the fundamental insights of

Structuralism have been supplied by Ferdinand de Saussure and Claude Levi-Strauss.

CLAUDE LEVI-STRAUSS Prof. Akhalaq Tade, Willingdon College,


Word ‘structure’ has been used in many different contexts and disciplines of science and humanities. As far as literary criticism is concerned, the word ‘structure’ has a special significance and it has been derived from linguistics. Almost all literary theories since ancient times emphasize the importance of structure of a work of art in the process of evaluating literature. Structure has elements that can be arranged or rearranged in order to modify the structure.



The Structuralist Criticism is a part of the French Structuralism which was initiated in 1950s by the renowned cultural anthropologist, Claude Levi-Strauss. Levi-Strauss with other writers showed that Structuralism cuts across the traditional disciplinary areas of humanities and social sciences by providing an objective account of all social and cultural practices. The special significance of Structuralism lies in the fact that it marks a revolt against a particular type of scholarship which dominated the French universities; and secondly it believed in a ‘return to the text’.



The aim of Structuralism was not to provide interpretation, unlike New Criticism, but to arrive at a ‘poetics’ that studies the conditions of meaning; the formal structures that organize a text and to create possibility for variety of meanings. Structuralist believes that a system of conventions is the matrix in which individual signs are embedded which acquire meaning and significance within a total structure. Structuralist presumes that meaning is made possible because of the existence of underlying systems of conventions which enable elements to function individually as signs. Prof. Akhalaq Tade, Willingdon College,


Saussure’s description of language and its elements provided basis for ‘signifier’ and ‘signified’.

He analyzed the sign into two components : a sound or acoustic component which he called as

signifier, and the mental or conceptual component as signified.



Saussure also introduced two other significant contrast terms which are very essential in the understanding of Structuralism : ‘langue’ and ‘parole’. Langue is a theoretical structure of a language which the speaker of that language must obey if he or she needs to communicate; whereas parole is actual use made of that system by the individual speaker. Structuralist is concerned with signifier rather than signified for structuralism gives primacy to langue over parole.



The aim of Structuralism, unlike New Criticism, is not to provide interpretation of any individual text; but to make clear the implicit grammar that governs the forms and meanings of all literary productions. Intention of the structuralist is to define the conditions that permit the very creation of a work of art, because he is concerned with the system of beliefs and ideas that make possible such creations.



The structuralist works upon a piece of literature in order to discover the principle that allowed the arrangement of words and phrases to form that piece. There is something mystic and indefinable in literature that has to be discovered; and this urge is scientific. Hence, by discovering that mystic element in literature, Structuralist criticism tries to make literary criticism a scientific discipline.



Important Structuralist critics :

Roland Barthes, Gerard Genette, Julia Kristeva,

Tzvetan Todorov



Structuralism is clearly in direct opposition to any form of the critical view which manifests that literature is a mode of communication between author and readers. Structuralist criticism is not an analysis of a particular work of art with an intention of providing its interpretation; but, on the contrary, it scrutinizes the work of art in order to find out its structure.



Structuralist criticism performs double function : firstly it analyses a text; and secondly it discovers or defines the underlying structure. This process may be called as ‘dissection and articulation’. In Structuralist criticism the reader is placed in the position of an author, as the vital agency, engaged in the impersonal activity of reading.



According to Structuralist criticism whatever the reader reads is not a work of art filled with meaning but, just ‘ecriture’, that is, writing. A literary work is nothing but a ‘text’, a mode of writing consisting of a play of component elements which belong to particular literary conventions and codes. These elements, according to M.H. Abrams, may produce an illusion of reality; but they neither have truth in them nor refer to any reality existing outside the literary system.



Structuralist tries to show that it is the language that speaks in literature; and thus, constructs an elaborate metalanguage assuming that literature is itself like language. Hence for Roland Barthes, language becomes ‘literature’s being’. Structuralist examines a work to discover how meaning is shaped or how meaning is made possible; and thereby discovers the basic structures of literature.



Roland Barthes (1915-80), a French critic, speaks about the parallelism of homology between language and narrative.



Roland Barthes Quotes Prof. Akhalaq Tade, Willingdon College,


According to Barthes, a narrative is like a long sentence and therefore in his view language of narrative achieves self-reflexivity. As per the assumption of Structuralism, the author is not assigned with any intention or initiative as a producer of a work of art. It is the conscious ‘self’ of him which is the creator of a work. Roland Barthes in his famous essay, The Death of the Author highlights it as, “As institution, the author is dead”.



Perhaps the most comprehensive contribution in this field is of Gerard Genette’s who in his Narrative Discourse (1980) incorporates all

aspects of narrative.



According to Genette, ‘narrative’ as a series of events is different from the act of narrating. Genette refines the term of narrative discourse to great accuracy suggesting that narrative is governed not by any relation to reality but by its own internal laws and logic.



According to Tzvetan Todorov, art is not expected to reproduce or imitate reality; it is, rather, a system by itself and is under no obligation to represent anything. Todorov’s books- The Poetics of Prose (trans; 1977) and Introduction to Poetics (trans; 1981) have

contributed a lot in the field of Structuralism.



Another significant structuralist Jonathan Culler,

in his Structuralist Poetics (1975) presented a wide-ranging survey of the programme and

accomplishments of Structuralist literary criticism.



Structuralism emphasized the view that literary meanings are determined by a system of invariant conventions and codes. But this scientific claim of Structuralism was destabilized by Deconstruction and other post-structural theories. Roland Barthes in his later writings abandoned the scientific aspirations of Structuralism and gave tremendous emphasis on the role of the reader in reading texts.



The absence of the author (death of the author) in the zenith days of Structuralism heralded Barthes to look upon the writing of a text as a practice. He remarks that readers are always free to take pleasures of the text. Barthes denied the scientific aspiration of Structuralism and distinguished between ‘lisible’ [readerly e.g. realistic novels] and ‘scriptible’ [writerly e.g. metafiction] texts.



The lisible is what we already know as a realistic novel which restricts the variety of interpretation by insisting on specific meaning; whereas the scriptible is that which is unintelligible in terms of our traditional models, and which encourages the reader to be a producer of his or her own meaning according to the multiplicity of codes. In this way the reader, according to Structuralism, contributes in the production and writing of the texts. Prof. Akhalaq Tade, Willingdon College,


THANK YOU FOR WATCHING

Presentation by

Prof. AKHALAQ TADE

Department of English

WILLINGDON COLLEGE

SANGLI – 416 415 (Maharashtra, INDIA)



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DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH - willingdoncollege.inwillingdoncollege.in/pdf/StudyMaterial/English/6_Structuralism.pdf · in the process of evaluating literature. ... ‘poetics’ that studies