S t r u c t u r al i s t Cr i t i c i sm

Presenter: Rizwan Ali Arain

Research Scholar, University of Sindh,
Jamshoro

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 arent physical entities;

theyre 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; its

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
its 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 shouldnt be
thought of as a field of study. Rather, its 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 worlds

surface phenomenawhether we place those phenomena,
for example, in the domain of mathematics, biology,
linguistics, religion, psychology, or literatureimply 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 wasnt 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 doesnt 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 soundimage livre as the sound-image book. The relationship
between signifier and signified is merely a matter of social
convention: its whatever the community using it says it is.

 Before examining Structuralists Approcahes to literature,

lets 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.
Lvi-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 Lvi-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, well 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 Spensers The Faerie Queene (1596),
JohnBunyans The Pilgrims 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.
Theyre human, like us, and so they suffer.
Examples of ironic texts include:
Shakespeares The Tempest (1611),
Edith Whartons 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 Swifts Gullivers Travels (1726),
George Orwells 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.