What is structuralism ?

What is structuralism? 
         A method of interpretation and analysis of aspects of human behavior. 
         According to philosopher Simon Blackburn structuralism is “the belief that phenomena of human life are not intelligible except through their interrelations. This relation constitutes a structure, and behind local variations in the surface phenomena there are constant laws of abstract culture.

What is structuralism? How it is applied to the study of literature?

                It is the spinoff of certain growth in linguistics and anthropology. Saussure’s mode of the coexistent study of language was an attempt to formulate the grammar of a language from a study of parole. Using the Saussurian linguistic model, Claude Levi-strauss examined the customs and conventions of some cultures with a view of arriving at the grammar of those cultures. Structuralist criticisms aim at forming a poetics or the science of literature from a study of literary works. It takes for granted ‘the death of the author’; hence it looks upon works as self-organized linguistic structure. The best work in structuralist poetics has been done in the field of narrative. In literary theory, structuralism is an approach to analyzing the narrative material by examing the underlying invariant structure. For example, a literary critic applying a structuralist literary theory might say that the authors of west side story did not write anything “really” new, because their work has the same structure as Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. In both texts a girl and a boy fail in love (a “formula” with a symbolic operator between them would be “boy + girl”) against the fact that they belongs to two groups that hate each other (“boy’s group-girl’s group” or “opposing forces”) and conflict is resolved by their death.

                   The utility of structuralism is such that a literary critic could make the same claim about a story of two friendly families (boys family + girl’s family) that arrange a marriage between their children despite the fact that the children hate each other (boys + girl) and then the children commit suicide to abdication the arranged marriage; the justification is that the second story structure is an ‘inversion’ of the first story’s structure: the relationship between the values of love and the two pairs of parties involved have been reversed. Structuralistic literary criticism argues that the “novelty value of a literary text” can lie only in new structure, rather than in specifics of character development and voice in which that structure is expressed.   
 

The structuralist method of criticism

                Literature, being primarily a work of language, and structuralism in its part, being preeminently a linguistic method, the most probable encounter should obviously take place on the terrain of linguistic material. Sound, forms, words and sentences constitute the common object of the linguist and the philologist to much an extent that it was possible, in the early Russian Formalist, to define literature as a mere dialect, and to envisage its study as an annex of general dialectology.

                   Traditional criticism regards criticism as a message without code; Russian Formalism regards literature as code without message. Structuralism by structural analysis makes it possible to uncover the connection that exists between a system of forms and a system of meaning, by replacing the search for term analysis with one for over all homologies. Meaning yielded by the structural relationship with a given work. It is not introduced from outside. Genette believed that the structural study of ‘poetic language’ and of the forms of literary expression cannot reject the analysis of the relation between code and message. The ambition of structuralism is confined to counting feet and to observe the repetition of phonemes: it must also study semantic it must also study semantic phenomena which constitute the essence of poetic language. It is this reference that Genette writes: “one of the newest most fruitful directions that are now opening up for literary research ought to be the structural study of the ‘large unities’ of discourse, beyond the framework- which linguist in the strict sense cannot cross-of the sentence one would thus study systems from a much higher level of generality, such as narrative description and the other major forms of literary expression. These would be linguistic of discourse that was a trans-linguistics.

                   Genette believes that structural criticism is untainted by any of the transcendent reductions of psychoanalysis or Marxist explanation. He furthers writes,”it exerts, in its own way, a sort of internal reduction, traversing the substance of the work in order to reach its bone structure, certainly not a superficial examination, but a sort of radioscopic penetration, and all the more external in that it is more penetrating”. Genette observes relationship between structuralism and hermeneutics also. He writes, ”thus the relation that binds structuralism and hermeneutics together might not be one of mechanical separation and exclusion, but of complementarily: on the subject of the same work, hermeneutic criticism might speak the language of the assumption of meaning and of internal recreation, and structural criticism that of distant speech and intelligible reconstruction”. They would, thus, bring out complementary significations, and their dialogue would be all the more fruitful.    

                Thus to conclude we may say, the structuralist idea is to follow literature in its overall evolution, while making synchronic cuts at various stages and comparing the table one with another. Literary evolution then appears in all its richness, which derives from the fact that the system survives while constantly altering. In this sense literary history becomes the history of a system: it is the evolution of the function that is significant, not that of the elements, and knowledge of the synchronic relation necessarily precedes that of the processes.

Summary of Gerard Genette, “structuralism and literary criticism”

Criticism and theory

The critic and the literary: Genette first introduces the good structuralist conception of the bricoleur as opposed to the engineer it will turn out that a critic is a bricoleur working with is to hand. Genette turns the artist into the engineer, a rather literary critical thing to do. Genette than makes the point that as literary criticism uses language to speak of language use, it is in fact a meta-literature, a literature on literature. Post-structuralist will change the distinction between the two, and Genette here refers to Barthes distinction s to suggest that some literary criticism may be literature.

                   He then assigns literariness in a way much like a formalist would: literariness is language production in which the attention is addressed to spectacle rather than message. Something one assume like Jacobson’s poetic function, or meta-poetic; in fact to put it right into Jacobson’s terms, the attention is one of the poetic rather than on the referential function, on medium rather than on message. Genette will later in the essay insist that this does not degrade the meaning-function of the language. Genette as well refers to that aspect of literature which is so close to the new critical understanding of ambiguity, the ‘half’, the attention to the constitution of meaning undritic is  a different aspect, that also belongs to erizes the literary: so it is that there is only a literary function, no literariness in only substantive or essential sense. Genette‘s sense of the ambiguity of literature is similar to jakobson’s in “linguistic and poetics”, in which essay he writes that “Ambiguity is an intrinsic, inalienable character of any self-focused message, briefly a corollary features of poetry….Not only the message itself but the addresser and the addressee become ambiguous”.  
   

The role of the critic: The critic is secondary to the writer, a bricoleur to the writer’s, engineer, but in a locality therefore to be primary in the analysis of culture. The critic treats as signs what the writer is creating as notion: the attitude, the outcome is different. The critic in reading literature as signs is reading it as a cultural production, constructed according to various preconceptions, routines, traditions and so forth of that culture. The critic does not ignore the meaning, but treats it as mediated by signs, not directly clashed. Where the post-structuralist will different is in their disclaimer that anything can be clear : all concept are themselves constructed of signs, there is no unmediated thought, all mediated thought is social thought, there is no attachment to anything beyond the sign.

Structuralism is more than a linguistic exercise: while structuralism historically is a linguistic phenomenon, and it would seen reasonable that structuralist criticism would then be linguistic in its nature, this is too simple an assumption. First of all, literary language is language used to certain ends, having a certain function and therefore featuring the qualities of linguistic production and the relationships of sounds and meaning in particular way. The ends then are important. As he writes structuralist methods as such is constituted at the very moment when one rediscovers the message in the code, uncovered by an analysis of the immanent structures and not imposed from the outside by ideological prejudices. Post-structuralists will deny that anything can be innocent of ideology.

                   Second, there is a homology, a structural relationship, between the way language cuts up the world of meaning, and the way literature and literary geners do. These are a comparison between literature and linguistics not only because they are both involved in language but because both deal with:

The reaction between forms and meanings,

The way reality is culturally defined by the segmentation and identification of experience,

The cultural perception of reality, and

The systemic relationships of signs which underlie those cultural perceptions.

      Structuralism is about meaning, not just about form: Genette is at pains to point out that structuralism is not just about meaning, as linguistic is about meaning. It is a study of the usual version or association of meaning according to the relation of sign that institute the meaning- spectrum of the culture. When jackobson writes of the centrality of allegory to imaginative writing, he places the categories of meaning at the heart of the structural method, as tropes, including metaphor and metonymy, are the way we say something by saying something else, figures of signification. Ambiguity, which is a meaning –function, is at the heart of the poetic function, as we saw in above. Finally in this section, Genette looks willing to structural analysis at the more macro level of the text, of the analysis of narratives, for instances-“an analysis that could distinguish in them, by a play of superimpositions, variable elements and constant function, and to rediscover in them the bi-axial system, familiar to Saussurian linguistics, of syntagmatic relation and paradigmatic relations.

Structuralism is general tendency of thought: structuralism is, however, not necessarily an intrinsic fact of nature but rather is a way of thinking; structures are “systems of relations, conceived rather than perceived, which analysis constructs as it uncovers them, and which it runs the risk of inventing while believing that It is discovering them”- that is, structures are explanations of coherence and repetition, they appear in what they seek to explain, they in a sense provide the terms and the vehicle of explanation. As we can only now through knowledge frames. Structuralism is the explanation of text or events in their own term, not in relation to external causes.

                   When one turns to the internal dynamic of a text as an object, a field meaning, and to the coherence of it as a text, rather than as biography or sociology, one reads structurally. Structuralists reading abdicate psychological, sociological, and such explanations. One can see new criticism as a structural methodology, although it is not structuralism: in structural analysis of themes, for instance, theme would be seen in the context of the relations of themes, that is, of certain elements of tendril of the disposition, or net work or matrix of, of social meanings, which meanings constitute culture.

Structuralism is however not merely intrinsic criticism, the criticism of the thing itself: Genette mentions the other form of innate criticism, phenomenological criticism in which one becomes in touch with the subjectivity of the creative voice of the work. Ricoeur refers to this, Genette writes, as the allegorical method: the intuitive convergence to two consciousnesses, the author and the readers. This is a little confusing because this is not hermeneutics properly speaking, but rather phenomenological hermeneutic. When there is hermeneutics, Genette says, when the text is available to us in that immediate a way, then structural reading fades; but whenever we have to look more objectively, when we are transferring obstruction of time, say , or of culture or interest, then the structural method, the search for principle of order coherence and meaning, becomes prevailing literatures distant in place and time, children’s literature, popular literature. Genette goes on to suggest that the difference between hermeneutic and structural reading is a matter of the critical position of the critic. Structuralism is an intrinsic reading free from subjectivity, when we become the ethnomethodologists of our culture.  

Structuralism ties the meaning of the work to the meaning to the meaning of the culture: Genette suggests that topic is an area of study that structuralism can bring us to-the conventional subjects and forms of the culture. Topics, or topoi, are structural in a sense psychological, Genette says, but collectively so, not individually. Throughout, in writing of the cultural knowledge that structuralism provides, Genette has been suggesting that ‘high ‘literature is not the only, perhaps not the primary a location for the study of cultural meanings: the serious study of popular culture has begun.

Structuralism opens the study of genre to new light: different genres Difference genres lead to different expectation of types of situations and action, and of psychological, moral, and esthetic values: without   conventional expectations we cannot have the difference, the surprise. Creativity is in a sense structural, as it depends on our expectation, which if them plays upon.

Structuralism can be applied to the study of literature as a whole, as a meaning system: structurally, literature is a whole; it functions as a system of meaning and reference no matter how many works there are, two thousand. Thus any work becomes the parole, the individual articulation, of a cultural langue, or system of signification. As literature is a system, no work of literature is an autonomous whole; similarly, literature itself is not autonomous but is part of the larger structures of signification of the culture. 

Structuralism studies literature synchronically, but with diachronic awareness :- structuralism  Studies literature historically by studying it as were in cross-section at different times, by seeing in what way literature divides up the traditional topics of the cultural imagination. Change is intrinsic to literature as the Russian formalist thought; what the changes registers is the alterations of meaning within the culture. Structuralism can then yield a fruitful approach to the history of literature, not as a series of great works, or of influences of one writer upon another, but more structurally, more systematically, as the way in which a culture’s discourses with itself alters. The meaning of an individual work is ultimately a larger frame of cultural meanings, and these meanings change in relation to one another across time and cultures. As well, the addition of other signifying systems, such as cinema, alters but do not disrupt the system of literature a structural analysis of the construction of cultural meaning can thence replace the meaning of the individual instance, the particular work, while the meaning of the individual work is illumined and rendered more fully significant by being read in the context of its full systemic, cultural meaning.