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…synchronic analysis of homologies “recreates” the text as a “paradigm”

…structuralism, in its scientific project, tends to focus on the fixity of relations within synchronic paradigms at the
expense of temporality, or the “diachronic” dimension, which involves history.

…tendency to avoid dealing with time and social change concerned many critics of structuralism from its
beginning and ultimately became a main target of deconstruction’s critique of the prior movement.

Jakobson is perhaps the most rigorous critic to use linguistic analyses…to analyze poems and narratives.

…structural analysis of the “system” of literature…

…genre theory…

…structuralism has more broadly attempted to analyze the structures (or grammar) of narrative.

…Levi-Strauss…diachronic dimension (the story line) is eclipsed in favor of a synchronic “reading” of “mythemes”
(recurrent narrative structures) in several versions of the Oedipus story.

The Critique of Structuralism

Derrida connects structuralism with a traditional Western blindness to the “structurality of structure, or an
unwillingness to examine the theoretical and ideological implications of “structure” as a concept.

…as if one could move outside of cultural understanding to take a detached view of culture.

…privileging of the opposition between “nature” and “culture”—what in The Raw and the Cooked Levi-Strauss
calls the tangible and intelligible.

Derrida …there is no standing free of structure, no so-called “natural” state free of the structural interplay that, in
the structuralist analysis, constitutes meaning. There is no objective examination of structure.

Derrida…recognize the interplay of differences among texts, the activity that he and others call structuration.

Kristeva… Semiotics, she argues, is not only a “science.” It also is a critique of science…

…assumption that the objects of science and the elements of scientific method can be simple and “pure”…

…natural and the human sciences also considers the former to be more ‘pure’ than the latter.”

…Kristeva… “semiotic research” always “ultimately uncovers its own ideological gesture.

… begins with a certain knowledge as its goal, and ends up discovering a theory…

…itself a signifying system…

… complex nature of semiotic study…

…both how meaning is conditioned and how it is communicated—the double project of … “articulation” and
“communication”…

…overwhelmingly cultural nature of language and discourse…

…always exists within a context of more than one person, more than one meaning.

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…language both communicates their thoughts and articulates and structures what can be thought. For this
reason, as Kristeva says, semiotics always turns and returns to “ideology” and the cultural formations in which it
works.

Kristeva offers a structural/semiotic analysis that is both informed by structuralism and has a tendency toward
poststructuralism, by the scientific method of semiotics and the deconstructive extension of that method.