English 441

Some Questions about Structuralism

1. When structuralists claim that everything is language, what exactly do they mean by this? Can you think of
some examples of these “languages”?
2. Richter identifies semiotics and structural linguistic systems as the two primary methods developed to analyze
systems of symbols. What are the three sign systems identified by semiotics? Which of these systems is closest
to language or literary language?
3. What is the distinction between langue and parole? Between synchronic and diachronic? Between parataxis
and syntaxis? What are emes? Now the hard part—what does all this have to do with literature?
4. How does Levi-Strauss adapt Saussurean structural linguistics to anthropology?
5. What was the great promise of structuralism? Why did it fail?
6. According to Derrida, what is the relationship between language and thought? Between writing and speech?
7. What is a “supplement”? What does the supplement reveal about the term/concept which it supposedly
supplements?
8. According to Derrida, in the gap between the signifier (word) and the signified (concept?) there is freeplay.
What does this mean? What does it mean for literary criticism?
9. How might you paraphrase the quote from Foucault that Richter gives on page 824?

Foucault, “What is an Author” (1969)

1. What is the paradox associated with the modern ‘disappearance’ of the author?
2. Foucault summarizes recent critical theory which posits that the writer disappears into the writing, a
development characterized by the French postmodern term écriture. But what ideas, according to Foucault,
nonetheless preserve the older concept of authorship? How do they do that?
3. Foucault initially says that the author's name allows us to group texts and to mark off or delimit those texts
from ordinary speech. It seems that cultures will receive and value them in different ways at different times.
What four characteristics does Foucault go on to attribute to the author-function?
4. What new kind of author-function is uncovered when Foucault broadens his discussion from literary texts to
"discourses" such as Marxism and psychoanalysis? What is special or new about this kind of author-function?
5. Foucault's conclusion: what research undertakings and insights does he say that his analysis of the author-
function will open up? How is the author an "ideological product"?

Garrett—English 441 1