s t r u c t u ralist criticism
DESCRIPTION
One of the Critical Theory of English Literature.TRANSCRIPT
Presenter: Rizwan Ali Arain
Research Scholar, University of Sindh,
Jamshoro
S t r u c t u r al i s t Cr i t i c i sm
What is Structuralism ?
Structuralism works to uncover the structures that
underlie all the things that humans do, think,
perceive, and feel.
Structure (Common Word)
VS
Structure ( Structural Activity)
How structuralism
defines the word structure ?
As discussed earlier, structures aren’t physical entities;
they’re conceptual frameworks that we use to organize and
understand physical entities.
A structure is any conceptual system that has the following
three properties:
(1) wholeness
(2) transformation
(3) self-regulation
Wholeness simply means that the system functions as a unit.
Transformation means that the system is not static; it’s
dynamic, capable of change. In other words, new material is
always being structured by the system.
Self-regulation means that the transformations of which a
structure is capable never lead beyond its own structural
system.
Structuralist Activity in Terms of
Literary Study You are not engaged in structuralist activity if you describe the structure of a
short story to interpret what the work means or evaluate whether or not it’s good literature.
However, you are engaged in structuralist activity if you examine the structure of a large number of short stories to discover the underlying principles that govern their composition
for example, principles of narrative progression (the order in which plot events occur) or of characterization (the functions each character performs in relation to the narrative as a whole). You are also engaged in structuralist activity if you describe the structure of a single literary work to discover how its composition demonstrates the underlying principles of a given structural system.
In other words, structuralists are not interested in individual
buildings or individual literary works (or individual
phenomena of any kind) except in terms of
what those individual items can tell us about the structures
that underlie and organize all items of that kind.
For structuralism sees itself as a human science whose effort is to
understand, in a systematic way, the fundamental structures that
underlie all human experience and, therefore, all human behavior
and production. For this reason, structuralism shouldn’t be
thought of as a field of study. Rather, it’s a method of systematizing
human experience that is used in many different fields of study:
for example, linguistics, anthropology, sociology, psychology, and
literary studies.
For structuralism, the world as we know it consists of two fundamental levels:
Visible
Invisible.
The visible world consists of what might be called surface phenomena: all the countless objects, activities, and behaviors we observe, participate in, and interact with every day.
The invisible world consists of the structures that underlie and organize all of these phenomena so that we can make sense of them
For example:
Our ability to construct simple sentences depends on our
internalization, whether or not we are aware of it, of the
grammatical structure subject-verb-object. Without a
structural system to govern communication, we would have
no language at all.
Structuralism assumes that all surface phenomena belong to
some structural system, whether or not we are consciously
aware of what that system is. The relationship of surface
phenomena to structure might be illustrated by the following
simplified diagram:
If you read the rows of surface phenomena from left to right, you have a list
of individual utterances, such as “dog runs happily” and “tree appears green.”
However, if you read the columns of the whole diagram from top to bottom,
you can see that the surface phenomena, which consist of fifteen different
items but could consist of many more, are governed by a structure that
consists, in this case, of only three parts of speech and two rules of
combination. Thus, the utterance “dog runs happily” (or any utterance that
follows the same grammatical pattern) is a surface phenomenon governed by
the following structure. Subject (Noun) + Predicate (Verb + Descriptor)
Where do these structures come from?
Structuralists believe they are generated by the human mind,
which is thought of as a structuring mechanism.
Thus, structuralism sees itself as a science of humankind, for
its efforts to discover the structures that underlie the world’s
surface phenomena—whether we place those phenomena,
for example, in the domain of mathematics, biology,
linguistics, religion, psychology, or literature—imply an
effort to discover something about the innate structures of
human consciousness.
Structural linguistics Structural linguistics was developed by Ferdinand de Saussure
between 1913 and 1915, although his work wasn’t translated into English and popularized until the late 1950s.
Before Saussure, language was studied in terms of the history of chnages in individual words over time, or diachronically, and it was assumed that words somehow imitated the objects for which they stood.
Saussure realized that we need to understand language, not as a collection of individual words with individual histories but as a structural system of relationships among words as they are used at a given point in time, or synchronically.
This is the structuralist focus. Structuralism doesn’t look for the causes or origins of language (or of any other phenomenon). It looks for the rules that underlie language and govern how it functions: it looks for the structure.
In order to differentiate between the structure that governs language and the millions of individual utterances that are its surface phenomena, Saussure called the structure of language langue (the French word for language), and he called the individual utterances that occur when we speak parole (the French word for speech). For the structuralist, of course, langue is the proper object of study; paroleis of interest only in that it reveals langue.
According to structuralism, the human mind perceives difference most readily in terms of opposites, which structuralists call binary oppositions: two ideas, directly opposed, each of which we understand by means of its opposition to the other. For example, we understand up as the opposite of down, female as the opposite of male, good as the opposite of evil, black as the opposite of white, and so on.
Furthermore, unlike his predecessors, Saussure argued that words do not simply refer to objects in the world for which they stand. Instead, a word is a linguistic sign consisting, like the two sides of a coin, of two inseparable parts: signifier + signified. A signifier is a “sound-image” (a mental imprint of a linguistic sound); the signified is the concept to which the signifier refers. Thus, a word is not merely a sound-image (signifier), nor is it merely a concept (signified). A sound image becomes a word only when it is linked with a concept.
Furthermore, the relationship between signifier and
signified, Saussure observed, is arbitrary: there is no
necessary connection between a given sound-image
and the concept to which it refers. There is no reason
why the concept of a tree should be represented by the
sound-image “tree” instead of by the sound-image “arbre”; the
concept of a book is just as well represented by the sound-
image “livre” as the sound-image “book.” The relationship
between signifier and signified is merely a matter of social
convention: it’s whatever the community using it says it is.
Before examining Structuralists Approcahes to literature,
let’s take a brief look at two related areas of cultural study in
which structuralist thought plays an important role:
Structural anthropology, which is the comparative study
of human cultures
Semiotics, which literature, is the study of sign systems,
especially as they apply to the analysis of popular culture.
Examples of structuralist activity in both these areas can help
us grasp the structuralist enterprise as a whole and prepare
us to better understand its applications to literature.
Structural Anthropology Structural anthropology, created by Claude Levi-Strauss in the late
1950s.
Lévi-Strauss took ideas from structural linguistics and applied them to culture. He argued that culture is also structured like a language: on the surface, cultures may seem different, but if we dig deep enough we'll find that they're organized by the same "rules" and structures. For instance, families may be defined differently in different cultures, but something common to cultures all over the world is a taboo on incest.
This is one of the foundational "rules" that all cultures share. But why does it need to be a rule? Well sure, said Lévi-Strauss, but there's more to it than that. He argued that a taboo on incest is integral to all cultures because it forces people to marry strangers outside of their families. And if we have to marry strangers, then we have to form communities. And if we have to form communities, then we have to form societies. If we didn't have the incest taboo, we wouldn't have human society at all, because the taboo forces us to move away from our family, into a community, and there you have it! The roots of civilization.
Semiotics
Just as structural anthropology applies structuralist insights
to the comparative study of human cultures, semiotics applies
structuralist insights to the study of what it calls sign
systems.
Structuralism and literature
For students of literature, structuralism has very important
implications. After all, literature is a verbal art: it is
composed of language. So its relation to the “master”
structure, language, is very direct.
In addition, structuralists believe that the structuring
mechanisms of the human mind are the means by which we
make sense out of chaos, and literature is a fundamental
means by which human beings explain the world to
themselves, that is, make sense out of chaos. So there seems
to be a rather powerful parallel between literature as a field
of study and structuralism as a method of analysis.
Structuralist approaches to literature have tended to focus on
three specific areas of literary studies:
The structure of literary genres,
The description of narrative operations,
The analysis of literary interpretation.
For the sake of clarity, we’ll discuss these three areas separately.
The structure of literary genres
Northrop Frye calls his theory of myths, which is a theory of
genres that seeks the structural principles underlying the Western
literary tradition.
According to Frye, human beings project their narrative
imaginations in two fundamental ways: in representations of:
An Ideal World
The Real World.
The ideal world, which is better than the real world, is the
world of innocence, plenitude, and fulfillment. Frye calls it
the mythos of summer, and he associates it with the genre of
romance. This is the world of adventure, of successful
quests in which brave, virtuous heroes and beautiful maidens
overcome villainous threats to the achievement of their goals.
Examples of romance:
Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1596),
JohnBunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678), and “Sleeping Beauty.”
Etc
In contrast, the real world is the world of experience,
uncertainty, and failure. Frye calls it the mythos of winter, and
he associates it with the double genre of irony/satire.
Irony is the real world seen through a tragic lens, a world in
which protagonists are defeated by the puzzling complexities
of life. They may dream of happiness, but they never attain it.
They’re human, like us, and so they suffer.
Examples of ironic texts include:
Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1611),
Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence
Etc
Satire is the real world seen through a comic lens, a world of
human folly, excess, and incongruity.
Examples of satire:
Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726),
George Orwell’s Animal Farm (1946)
Tragedy involves a movement from the ideal world to the
real world, from innocence to experience, from the mythos
of summer to the
mythos of winter, and therefore Frye calls tragedy the mythos
of autumn.