Structuralism
Structuralism still claims to yield the systematic and law governed description. Structuralism is in many ways a continuation of formalism or a further professionalization of formalism. It is, like formalism, fundamentally linguistic, i.e. language oriented. It rejects mimetic statements, it rejects pragmatic statement, it also rejects expressive statements. It is an essentially objective theory of literature. The safe side is, of course, the factual side. In order to escape all political ramifications, one needs to deny the significance of the concrete utterance of the text. Shklovsky had already made this acceptable by saying that "the artifact itself is quite unimportant." Instead, what literary scholars, according to Structuralism, should be interested in is the system, the general working of literature, in other words: its structure.
Early in the century Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure’s innovative course at Geneva overturned the orthodox views of German philology and laid the basis for a new approach not just to linguistics, but to anthropology and sociology as well. De Saussure had been a part of that movement that launched the investigation of the Asiatic origins of European languages. The quest for the original Ur-language that united European languages with ancient Greek and Sanskrit was one that had gripped the imagination of German philologists like Adam Muller. However, this program, rich as it was, was also replete with political motivations that called its objectivity into question. The model of linguistic dissemination implied a hierarchy of races, with an Aryan superiority. The contest for national proximity to the Ur-language was a one for authenticity that diverged from a purely scientific investigation.
His Course does not reject outright the investigations of the philologists - much of these were real advances. What he does is to challenge some of the suspect methodological assumptions. So for example the idea that languages that are closer to the original are in any way superior is rejected by him as unscientific. Furthermore, he demonstrates, linguistic similarities do not necessarily arise from direct borrowing. Languages may be similar in structure of syntax and yet share no common origin of even influence.
Thus Saussure broke with the 19th century tradition of looking at language in a historical way (how languages have grown out of others), and suggested studying the abstract structure of a language (langue) instead of concrete acts or utterances (parole). Saussure distinguished between a syntagmatic axis of language (the grammar) and a paradigmatic axis (the semantics). This distinction is what led Roman Jakobson to his famous statement that in literature both axis work with the principle of similarity.
But what was even more interesting in Saussure's discovery was the working of semantics itself. How does meaning come about? How do we signify to each other? Since antiquity it was clear that we use signs, for example the word 'chair' for this furniture to sit on. But how do we know that a chair is a chair? We know that the bible had suggested that Adam and Eve had chosen the words, but at that time English didn't exist yet. Linguists had tried to solve that enigma for hundreds of years. Some argued for onomatopoetic similarities and for a development of writing out of iconic, i.e. picture signs. Saussure came up with a simple and ingenius answer: a chair is a chair because it is not a fair. In other words: Saussure suggested that signs are entirely arbitrary, that there is no relation between a sign and its meaning. Instead, Saussure argued, language is pure form. It works through internal differences, for example the distinction between 'ch' and 'f', two different phonemes which do not have any meaning, but they establish meaning difference, as for example between chair and fair.
Thus, Saussure said, a sign has two parts, like the two sides of a piece of paper: the signifier (the spoken word or the letters) and the signified, the meaning. By social contract, the signifier is unfailingly bound to the signified, but the internal relation is arbitrary. But that means that a sign does not acquire its meaning by its relation to reality, but by its relation to other signs. And this relation is always established by at least one fundamental binary opposition: like for instance voiced and unvoiced.
Saussure rejects the conception of language as one of simple correspondence to the physical world. Words, he says exist primarily in relation to one another, before they exist in relation to an object. It is the relation of sign to the code of signification that accords it meaning, rather than a simple correspondence with an external object. Again de Saussure shows through looking at linguistic variation and innovation that distinctions within the language have a knock on effect upon other terms, tenses, prefixes and so on, that means that any singular innovation necessarily impacts upon the whole code of language, or its structure (hence his linguistics are sometimes called structural). Here de Saussure was taking language out of the realm of logic, to look at language and its grammar as an object of study in its own right.
n Structural Linguistics. General Principles
1. Meaning occurs through difference. Meaning is not identification of the sign with object in the real world or with some pre-existent concept or essential reality; rather it is generated by difference among signs in a signifying system.
2. Relations among signs are of two sorts, contiguity and substitutability, the axes of combination and selection: hence the existence of all 'grammars', hence all substitutions, hence the ability to know something by something else, or by a part of it in some way -- hence metonymy and metaphor. The conception of combination and selection provides the basis for an analysis of 'literariness' or 'poeticality' in the use, repetition and variation of sound patterns and combinations. It also provides keys to the most fundamental elements of culture. Premise Anti-humanism:The author is dead.
3. Structuralism notes that much of our imaginative world is structured of, and structured by, binary oppositions (being/nothingness, hot/cold, culture/nature, Saussure's langue and parole- the language system of rules and the individual utterance; sign=signifier+signified); these oppositions structure meaning, and one can describe fields of cultural thought, or topoi, by describing the binary sets which compose them.
4. Structuralism forms the basis for semiotics, the study of signs: a sign is a union of signifier and signified, and is anything that stands for anything else. sign = signifier—signified= sign—referent. The relation between is arbitrary in that it actually has no natural connection with the signified. Meaning is not fixed. A signifier means by its difference from the other signifiers. Saussure:"The linguistic sign unites, not a thing and a name, but a concept and a sound-image. . . The two elements are intimately united, and each recalls the other. signifier + signified -referent triad: The inclusion of the concept within the triad of signification suggests that there is no natural or immediate relation between the words and the 'thing.' In Saussure's model, the arbitrary linking of signifier and signified is forgotten in the practice of actual speakers who behave as if a sign were a perfect unity, but in Lacan and others the signifier's arbitrariness determines the whole operation of signification.
n Structural Poetics
Roman Jakobson's metaphor and metonymy
His study of aphasia: two major kinds of disorder--'similarity disorder' and 'continguity disorder'
He relates these two kinds to the two basic rhetoric figures: metaphor and metonymy. Linguistic signs, for him, are formed through the two-fold process of "selection" and "combination."
(From Barthes Structuralism and Semiotics p. 78)
Jacobson's methodology:
1. discover the distributive pattern which link the stanzas of poems in a variety of combinations;
2. shows that the central lines are a some way distinguished and set off from the rest.
n Structuralist analysis of narrative (narratology):
Narrative Structure: Vladmir Propp and Greimas
While Propp focused on a single genre, Greimas aims to arrive at the universal 'grammar' of narrative by applying to it a semantic analysis of sentence structure
Syntax as the basic model for their analysis: Suject + predicate = Actant + function
For Propp there are seven 'sphere of action' (villain, hero, false hero, donor[provider], helper, dispatcher, princess [and her father].); three pairs of binary oppositions including six roles (actants)--Subject/Object, Sender/ Receiver, Helper/Opponent- and three basic patterns: 1. Desire, search, or aim, 2. communication 3. Auxiliary support or hindrance. In total 31 functions grouped into 3 structures (symtagms): contractual, performative, disjunctive. This kind of structuralist analysis is useful on popular cultural products or shorter texts for characters can break these categories.
Like Propp, Greimas argues for a 'grammar' of narrative, ...But unlike Propp, he sees the story as a semantic structure analogous to the sentence and yielding itself to an appropriate kind of analysis.
He refines and develops Propp's work Example: "The Purloined Letter"; three pairs of actants: Helper/Opponent, Sender/Reciever, Subject/Object and three basic patterns of action: contractive, disjunctive, and performative. He is also more truly 'structuralist' in that the former thinks in terms of relations between entities rather than of the character of entities themselves.
Greimas' semiotic rectangle: four terms, instead of two. e.g. "The Purloined Letter" See Structuralism and Semiotics (below).
Thematic Structure: scapegoat; Oedipus complex (e.g. model: Levi Strauss's over-evaluation of kinship and under-evaluation of kindship )
Structure of Narration (narrator-narratee)
Genette
text, story, narration
tense: order, duration, frequency
mood: distance and perspective (focus) --regulation of information
voice: time of narrating, narrative levels (the level of the story, the level of the narrating), and "person"
Jonathan Culler (The Pursuit of Signs)
Story and discourse.
A distinction should be made between the sequence of events and the way they are told. The critic should also decide if the former's revelation depends on the latter. For example, in the story of Oedipus the King, Oedipus admits to killing the king after he knows that he is the king's son, whereas in the witness's account it's "three robbers" that kills the king, but not three "travellers." Seymour Chatman ("What Novels Can Do That Films Can't [and Vice Versa]") uses the distinction between the story time and discourse time to talk about the differences between film narration and novelististic narration. He argues that films (because of the illusion of motion, or visual continuity) cannot really stop and describe, whereas novels can.
n Structuralism and Semiotics (theory of signs)
reference: Barthes’ Structuralism and Semiotics (see Guías de Lectura )
Central too to semiotics is the idea of codes, which give signs context -- cultural codes, literary codes, etc. The study of semiotics and of codes opens up literary study to cultural study, and expands the resources of the critic in discussing the meaning of texts. Structuralism, says, Genette, "is a study of the cultural construction or identification of meaning according to the relations of signs that constitute the meaning-spectrum of the culture."
Greimas defines semiotics as "a hierarchy that can be subjected to analysis and the elements of which can be determined by reciprocal relations (and by communication)" (22)...a semiotics exits only as a possibility of description and the system of relations described does not depend on the nature of the signs by which the external or internal world is manifested. ...such theories attempt to account for the articulation and of manifestation of the semantic universe as a totality of meaning belonging to the cultural or personal order. (64)
Greimas' semiotics seeks to account for the articulation and the narrativization of the semantic universe as a totality of meaning. Similar to the distinction between langue and parole in Saussurian linguistics, in Greimas' semiotics there is the distinction between the deep (semantic) structure and surface syntax, only the latter can be further divided into narrative structure (surface structure) and discoursive structure (the structure of manifestation). The process of narrativization goes through a series of conversion horizontally from the fundamental semantics to fundamental syntax and vertically from fundamental syntax to surfface narrative syntax and then to discoursive syntax. The object of semiotics, to Greimas, is this process of transformation, which is the production of meaning.
This system of the different levels of structures, or semiotics, to Greimas, is "a hierarchy that can be subjected to analysis and the elements of which can be determined by reciprocal relations (and by communication)" (xxvi). Central to this system is the semiotic square in the deep semantic structure, the perception of an idea (S) with its opposition (-S) and negation (S1). In Jameson's interpretation, "the semiotic rectangle or 'elementary structure of signification' is the representation of a binary opposition or of two contraries (S and -S), along with the simple negations or contradictories of both terms (the so-called subcontraries S1and -S1): significant slots are constituted by the various possible combination of these terms, mostly notably the 'complex' term (or ideal synthesis of the two contraries) and the 'neutral term' (or ideal synthesis of the two subcontraries)" (The Political Unconscious 166; Cf. Prinson-House 162-66). This elementary structure, according to Greimas, should be considered "on the one hand, as a concept uniting the minimal condition for the apprehension and/or the production of signification, and on the other hand, as a model containing the minimal definition of any language..and of any semiotic unit." In other words, the semiotic square, "the universal" for Greimas, is the basic mode of signification both in human thinking and all forms of discourse including the narrative.
The semiotic square (the main object of the theory of the semiotic square is to articulate the substance of the content and therein constitute the form of the content) defines relations of the four terms but not their content; it is comprehensible only when converted into actantial syntax. In the narrative, there are three pairs of actants as binary oppositions--Subject/Object, Sender/ Receiver, Helper/Opponent. These pairs establish relations between subjects and objects that recur in all narratives:
1. Wanting (e.g. desire, search, or aim),
2. Exchange (e.g. communication)