STRUCTURALISM

 STRUCTURALISM

• Opposition to Biographical and Cultural Interpretation: Similar to New Criticism, Structural Criticism rejects the idea of interpreting a literary text through the lens of cultural or intellectual history or the biographies of authors.
• French Influence: Structural Criticism was developed by French critics who were influenced by Ferdinand De Saussure's linguistic theories.
• Russian Formalists: Russian Formalists played a role in shaping the ideas of structural critics. They focused on defining "literariness" in formal terms, examining the formal properties that make a text literary as opposed to non-literary.
• Foregrounding: Russian Formalists argued that authors highlight specific formal devices in their texts, which attract readers' attention, creating a sense of "foregrounding." These devices distinguish the text from others of its kind and reflect the author's reaction against previous literary styles.
• Saussure's Influence: Saussure viewed language as a closed system governed by internal rules. Language consists of words, and the meaning of a word is derived from its internal relationships within the language system, not its connection to the external world.
• Signifier and Signified: Saussure's theory includes the concept of the signifier (the spoken or written form of a word) and the signified (the concept associated with the word). This relationship is arbitrary and internal to language.
• Application to Literary Texts: Structural critics applied Saussure's idea of language as a closed system to literary texts. They believed that words in a text derive their meaning from their relationships with other words within the text.
• Text as a Second-Order Language System: Literary texts were seen as "second-order" language systems, similar to Saussure's theory of language. Structuralists sought to identify the underlying rules governing the relationships between signs in a text.
• Grammar of Narratives: Structural critics applied their approach to the study of novels, searching for an underlying grammar of narratives. This grammar consists of rules that explain how all narratives in novels are constructed, similar to the rules of grammar governing sentences in language.
• Deductive Approach: Roland Barthes introduced a deductive approach to analyze narratives. Instead of conducting empirical analyses of numerous stories to form generalizations, this approach involves testing hypotheses against individual cases or variants.
• Literary Production and Ideology: Pierre Macherey, a French Structuralist critic, emphasized that authors are not creators in the traditional sense but producers who assemble pre-existing materials, including language and ideologies, to create literary texts. These texts are meant for consumption.
• Focus on Ideology: Macherey's focus on ideology as a governing principle distinguishes him from Russian Formalists and other structural critics. He views ideology as a set of imaginary beliefs endlessly produced and reproduced by the conditions of life and societal institutions in a capitalist state. He believes that understanding a text involves examining what it doesn't explicitly say, such as its "silence, fractures, and absences."