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…not as constituted by its intrinsic (“natural”) meaning, as an imitation of reality, but by relational patterns that are
meaningful in a particular work and genre.

…Moscow Linguistic Circle, begun in 1915, and OPOYAZ (Society for the Study of Poetic Language), started in
1916.

…Prague Linguistic Circle (founded in 1926), of which Roman Jakobson…

…Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale (1928).

…avoid all romantic notions about poetic inspiration, genius, or aesthetic organicism.

…deliberately mechanistic view of poetry and other literary art as the products of craft.

…no particular deployment of words, images, or other language effects is intrinsically literary.

…literature, like other usages of language, could have a particular function, could “work” to accomplish particular
ends…

…Kenneth Burke…more linguistic rather than “sociological”…

…language deployed as language…

…as the object of criticism. Linguistic properties then become the primary concern—instead of “inspiration”…

…identifying formal properties as effective…

…Shklovsky [Russian Formalism]… literary “device” aimed at effecting some end…

…Saussure’s “functional” definition of linguistic entities.

…concentration on images…leads one to view a poem as having actual “content”…

… “content” needs to be considered as “device”…

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…language is a medium of communication before it is used in art…

…overly familiar to the reader…

To be made new and poetically useful, such language must be “defamiliarized” and “made strange” through
linguistic displacement…

Rhyme schemes (or lack of rhyme), chiasmus (rhetorical balance and reversal), catachresis (the straining of a
word or figure beyond its usual meaning), conceits, mixed metaphors, and so on—all these devices for producing
particular effects…

…intricacy and texture of verbal structure.

…quite different from romantic criticism’s view…for transcendent (or divine) feelings or poetic (or personal)
genius.

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.