Literary Theory: Structuralism

1. UNIT 2, Part 2:
STUCTURALISM

2. What is structuralism?
• Order, or Structure, in everything … is Everything!
• Everything is organised in structural patterns … society, culture,
language, literature… even thought and behaviour!
• Central to Structuralism are Binary Oppositions.
• Literary texts are composed of a series of signs that make up their
hidden logic.

4. • Originated in the early 1900s, in the structural
linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure.
• Subsequently taken up by the Prague (Roman Jakobson),
Moscow and Copenhagen schools of linguistics.
• In the late 1950s and early '60s, structural linguistics was
challenged by Noam Chomsky and other like theorists.
• Claude Lévi-Strauss revived structuralism.

5. Ferdinand de Saussure (1857 – 1913)• Swiss linguist.
• Language is not just about the relationship between words and the
things they designate.
• Linguistic Signifier: language is a system of signs rather than a
naming process. Each sign has 2 binary opposites.
• A Signifier (the sound pattern of a word, either in mental projection
or in actual, physical realization of a speech act) and a Signified (the
concept or meaning of the word): langue v/s parole.

8. Different words can describe the
same objects or concepts. Alternately,
the same word can describe different
objects or concepts. Hence, a specific
sign does not always have to be used
to express a given signifier. Signs are
therefore "arbitrary". Signs thus gain
their meaning from their relationships
and contrasts with other signs.

13. Roman Jakobson (1896 – 1982)
• The term "structuralism" was introduced into Linguistics by Jakobson
in the early days of the Linguistic Circle of Prague, founded in 1926.
• While Saussure focused on examining language as a static system of
interconnected units, Jakobson’s Structural Linguistics suggests
that the identity of a sign is determined by its existence in a state
of contrast with other signs that can be either syntagmatic or
paradigmatic.

14. • Paradigmatic relations are sets of units that exist in the mind; e.g. the phonological
set cat, bat, hat, mat, fat, or the morphological set ran, run, running. The units of a
set must have something in common with one another, but they must also contrast
with each other, else they would collapse into a single unit.
• Syntagmatic relations are temporal and consist of a row of units that contrast with
one another, like "the man hit the ball" or "the ball was hit by the man". What units
can be used in each part of the row is determined by the units that surround them.
• There is therefore an interweaving effect between syntagmatic and paradigmatic
relations.

18. Formalism Structuralism
• Analyses, interprets and evaluates the
inherent features of a text.
• These features include grammar, syntax
and literary devices.
• The formalist approach reduces the
importance of a text’s historical,
biographical, and cultural context.
• Structural Linguistics attempts to classify all
elements of the text at their different
linguistic levels: phonemes, morphemes,
lexical categories, noun phrases, verb
phrases, and sentence types.
• Recognises that the significance of each
word within a text is determined by internal
as well as external factors; i.e. historical,
biographical and cultural contexts.

19. • Formalism analyses the way textual elements achieve defamiliarisation because of
their difference from their environment. Literary texts can be said to be oriented
towards themselves. Literature focuses on its own form; its focus is on the message
rather than on the reader.
• In reality, texts have more than one function simultaneously. As literature refers to
itself, it also refers to the outside world since it incorporates many referential
content about this world along the artistic elements of its own identity.
• Structuralism expands the Formalist’s notion of “function”. It explains how literature
is concerned with itself as it also is connected with the outside world.
FORMALISM V/S STRUCTURALISM