Chapter 5: Literature and LinguisticsA Handbook of Critical Approaches to Literature

Chapter 5: Literature and Linguistics

I. Structuralism and Post-structuralism, Including Deconstruction

A. Structuralism: Contexts and Definitions

Structuralists identify structures, systems of relationships, which endow signs (words) with meanings

B. The Linguistic Model

Saussurean linguistics: la langue, la parole, semiotics, syntagmatic reading; Jakobson, communicative functions

Chapter 5C. Russian Formalism: Extending Saussure

Moscow scholars after World War I: Propp (folktales), Shklovsky (poetry as defamiliarization); narrative = story + plot

D. Structuralism, Lévi-Strauss, and Semiotics

Structural anthropology: all societies have complex structures; paradigmatic approach to “deep structures” of culture and myth

Chapter 5E. French Structuralism: Coding and DecodingFrench structuralists Barthes, Derrida, Foucault, Todorov all used Saussure to read complex texts (Proust, Balzac)Narrative analogous to sentence—syntagmatic reading; cf Russian Formalists on story and plot (histoire and discours)Text is message to be understood by a code; Barthes’s codes: actions (proairetic), puzzles (hermeneutic), cultural, connotative, symbolicF. British and American InterpretersCuller: seeks to expand the poetics of structuralism

Chapter 5G. Post-Structuralism, Deconstruction

Influenced by Barthes’s structuralism

texts subversively undermine their meaning just as language is constant free play and deferred meaning, with broad referentiality

Derrida: difference, philosophical skepticism; meaning reveals contradictory structures within

Chapter 5II. Dialogics

Bakhtin’s dialogics expresses the inherent addressivity of all language especially as it appears in the polyphonic novelCarnivalizationMarxist and Christian influencesRole of the grotesque A subject is not an object of address but a dialogic partner; heteroglossiaMae Gwendolyn Henderson