UNIT 2, Part 2:

STUCTURALISM

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.

• 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.

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.

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.

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.

• 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.

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.

• 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