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Northrop Frye: Literature itself had a system that was created through objective
laws throughout history (modes, myth and genres). The four narrative categories
of literature were ‘comic, romantic, tragic and ironic’, coinciding with the
seasons, and by identifying the literary categories, we can identify literary modes
– for example, the hero is totally superior to others in the myth, in the romantic
he is superior in degree. To analyse literature fully, we must expel history from it
and analyse it using literary history only. Literature is as religion.
Structuralism is obsessed with structures and the laws that govern structures.
Individual works become mere instances of a law or laws, and the meaning of
one work depends upon its individual units and the relationships between them –
for example, an image of a sun and a moon in a poem is a structure, but
structuralists believe that the meaning of one depends upon its relation to the
other. Their meaning is relational, and thus all you need to know to infer meaning
is found within the work. This also means that, as long as the relationships
between the elements remain unchanged – even if the elements are changed –
then the story will remain the same. The individual items themselves have no
special symbolism or meaning.
Ferdinand de Saussure:
Ex: c-a-t – the written is the signifier while the signified is ‘cat’, what the
letters spell out. The relationship between them is arbitrary. This is also
true for the whole word ‘cat’ and what it refers to, the actual animal (the
referent).
Each word, thus, has meaning only because it is different to others – cat’s
meaning exists in the fact that it is not cap, cad or bat.
Historical change affects the individual parts of a language which, in turn, affects
the whole language. Change is, therefore, disturbance and disequilibrium in an
otherwise conflict-free system. It is also something that happens by accident.
Jakobson:
The poetic is about a language in self-conscious relationship to itself – that is, the
poetic functioning of language promotes signs and draws attention to their
material qualities rather than simply using them in communication. In the poetic,
the sign is pulled away from its object, which gives it a certain independence.
Czech structuralists also insisted that each work was to be considered as one
part of a whole.
Vladimir Propp – seven spheres of action and 31 fixed elements make up all folk
tale by combining the spheres of action in different ways. A.J. Greimas also
added the idea of a structural unit, an actant (Subject, Object, Sender, Reciever,
Helper, Opponent) which swallow up Propp’s spheres of action. Tzetan Todorov
does the same with the Decameron by reducing all the characters to nouns and
their actions as verbs, does allowing every story of the Decameron to be read as
a kind of extended sentence.
Gerard Genette – recit, the actual order of events in the text; histoire – the
sequence in which those events actually occurred; narration – the act of
narrating. The first two can be considered as plot and story. There are also five
central categories of narrative analysis – order (time order of narrative, including
prolepsis/anticipation; analepsis/flashback); duration (time spent on narrations’
episodes); frequency (did an event happen once and was narrated once, or was
it narrated several times but happened once?); mood – distance (relation of the
narration to its materials, i.e. is it recounting the story [diagesis] or representing
it [mimesis?] and is it told in free/direct/indirect speech?) and perspective (point
of view).
With point of view, the narrator may know more or less than the
characters, the narrative may be delivered by an omniscient narrator or
recounted by one character from within the story in one fixed position or In
variable positions, or it may be recounted by several characters. There is
also the matter of external focalization – the narrator knows less than the
characters.
There is also ‘voice’ – the act of narrating. A narrator may be heterodiegetic
(absent from his own narrative), homodiegetic (inside his narrative, i.e. first
person) or autodigetic (he is inside the narrative and is the main character, such
as Harry Potter). Ergo, it alerts us to the difference between narration – the
act/process of telling a story – and narrative – what is actually said.
Gains of structuralism: