Structuralism

How things began

Structuralism began with linguistics professor Ferdinand de Saussure who

gave a series of lectures on language at the University of Geneva between
1906 and 1911. He died in 1915

Saussure's students compiled those notes and lectures into a book that
was published in 1916 as Course in General Linguistics.

That book would be picked up by other linguists, most importantly a

Russian named Roman Jakobson and his colleagues in the Prague School
of linguists. They built on Saussure's theory to develop what came to be
known as the field of "structural linguistics.“ Saussure's structuralism was
still confined to the world of linguistics.

But then, the 1940s happened, and that's when theorists and scholars
from other fields started paying attention. From there, structuralism
exploded. Anthropologists, philosophers, literary theorists, psychologists,
all began applying structuralist principles in their fields, and structuralist
theories soon made their way into a range of disciplines in the humanities
and social sciences.
Saussure's big idea was that language is a system, or structure, made up
of contrasting elements, or binary oppositions. We only understand what
something is by understanding what it is not.

Roman Jakobson was the most important of the linguists inspired by

Saussure. He was a Russian linguist who ended up taking the techniques of
examining language in little pieces into the realm of what language
actually meant.

On the surface, cultures may seem different, but if we dig deep enough
we'll find that they're organized by the same "rules" and structures.

Vladimir Propp was the first theorist to apply a structural approach to

the study of narratives. ("plotlines." )
Roland Barthes was one of the earliest and most important of the
structuralist literary theorists who applied structural ideas to literature.

He started out as a structuralist, and then later came to be associated

with post-structuralism

Applied Saussure's ideas to other forms of cultural and social

phenomena

Tzvetan Todorov believed that the literary theorist's task was to identify
the underlying principles that governed works of literature.
Structuralist theorists are interested in identifying and analyzing the
structures that underlie all cultural phenomena—and not just literature.

language is a "sign system" made up of unchanging patterns and rules.

If underlying patterns or structures govern language (they said), doesn't

that mean that underlying patterns or structures shape a// human
experience?

for structuralists language can be any form of signalling—not just speech

or words, but anything that involves communication.

when we talk about the narrative elements of a novel, for example—

things like plot, character, conflict, setting, point of view—we're borrowing
the structuralist idea that there are certain principles or structures that
can be found in ai! novels.

"structures' that texts have in common with one another.

Structure

According to structuralist theorists there's some sort of structure underlying all

cultural
phenomena. Language has a deep structure, families have a deep structure,
literature
has a deep structure.

Langue

A French word referring to the deep structure (or grammar) underneath language.
It's
in charge of the infinite variety of sentences, utterances, and phrases that are,
on the
surface, different from one another.

Parole

This refers to specific utterances or speech acts. Paroles may be different on the
surface (the word parole is spelled differently and doesn't mean the same thing as
langue), but they are all governed by the same "/angue" (so both those words are
nouns).

Signifier

A marker (like a word) that refers to a specific concept. For instance the word
"tree" is
the signifier for the concept of a tree, which you are probably imagining right
now.
Signified

The concept that the signifier refers to. The word or signifier "tree" refers to
the
"signified," which is that big thing in the forest with a trunk and green leaves (a
tree).
While non-structuralist literary critics might want to analyze what one
poem sounds like and what that means, structuralists care about the
relationships between a large number of poems.

What matters to structuralist literary theorists isn't the one poem so much
as what it tells us about the structures governing all poetry.

to analyze not one poem, but lots of them.

universal structure of tragic drama, or of poems,
The "deep structures" are unchanging and unchangeable.