Structuralism and Semiotics

Aya Al-Orjani
DR. Malek Zuraikat
 The outlines
1. Definition of poetics
2. Structuralism and literary criticism
3. Science versus literature
4. Semiotics as a theory of reading
5. The content and structure of the concept of literature

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 Introduction
The use of language as a model for understanding the
aspects of reality that are non-linguistic in character
established structuralism particularly in 1960s. yet,
literature seemed especially appropriate to a
structuralist approach since it was wholly made up of
language. semiotics is closely related to structuralism.
The term semiotic was coined by in the late nineteenth
century by the American philosopher Peirce to denote
the formal doctrine of signs.
 The definition of poetics
All deny the autonomous character of the literary work
and regard it as the manifestation of laws that are external
to it and that concern the psyche, or society, or even the
human mind. The literary work is the expression of
something and the goal of the psychological, sociological
and ethnological studies to reach this thing. In the
interpretation of particular works, poetics does not seek to
name meaning, but aims at knowledge of the general laws
that preside over the birth of each work.
Poetics is therefore an approach to literature at once abstract and
internal. It is not the literary work that is the object of poetics,
what poetics questions are the properties of the particular
discourse that is literary discourse. the work will then
be projected upon something other than itself; it will not be
heterogenous structure but the structure of the literary discourse.
All poetics is structural since the object of poetics is not the sum of
empirical phenomena but an abstract structure. This leads us to
talk about the relation between poetics and linguistics. Literature
is the product of language. For this reason, any knowledge of
language will be of interest to the poetician.
In this case, the only science that can take literature is poetics
since its object is linguistics, the unique science of language.
Therefore, poetics is related to other sciences
as language forms part of their object. Its closest relatives
will be other disciplines that deal with discourse, the group
forming the field of rhetoric. It is here that poetics
participate in the general semiotics project that unites all
investigations whose point of departure is the sign.
 Structuralism and literary
criticism
One of the features that distinguishes literary criticism from
other kinds of criticism is that it uses the same materials
which are literary works. It speaks the same language as its
object, so it is a metalanguage, discourse upon discourse.
This means that we deal with metaliterature. Being a form
of language and structuralism, the Russian formalist
movement defined literature as a dialect. This means that
literature is a code without a message.
However, when the structuralist method is built, one can rediscover
the message within the code, uncovered by the analysis of the other
structures and not imposed by ideological tendencies. The
structuralist method was enhanced by the existence of the sign
which rests on the connection between form and meaning.
Therefore, structuralist analysis uncovers the connection that exist
between a system of forms and a system of meanings by replacing
the search for term-by-term analogies with overall homologies.
Structuralism then, would appear as
a refuge for all immanent criticism
against the danger of fragmentation
that threatens thematic analysis
which means the tools of building
the unit of the work, its principle of
coherence, and what Spitzer called
its spiritual etymon.
Roland Barthes: Science versus
literature
Structuralism can be said to find itself at each level of
literature. First at the level of the content or the forms of
the content. Secondly, at the level of the forms of the
discourse. And finally at the level of the words. At every
level, the literary work offers structuralism the picture of a
structure homological with language itself. This what leads
structuralism to find a science of literature whose object is
the language of the literary forms.
Subjectivity and objectivity: every utterance implies its own
subject, whether this subject is expressed in a direct
fashion using "I" or indirectly by being referred to as "he" or
by avoided altogether by the means of impersonal
constructions.

Codes: scientific discourse believes in the neutral state of

language and considers it as the referential code or superior
code for all specialized languages. Nonetheless, writing or
literature aims at being a total code since it can practice
language in its totality.
Pleasure: the last margin that science must
reconquer is pleasure. The pleasure that arises
from literature implies an experience much
vaster and more meaningful. what the human
sciences are discovering today, in whatever field
it may be sociological, psychological, linguistic,
literature has always known. The only difference
is that literature has not said it but written it.
 Jonathan Culler:
Semiotics as a theory of reading
The aegis of semiotics seek to identify the
conventions and operations by which any signifying
practice such as literature produces its observable
effects of meaning. A semiotics of literature is based
on two assumptions: first, that literature should be
treated as a mode of signification and
communication, in that a proper description of a
literary work is must refer to the meanings it has
for readers. second, that one can identify the effects
of the signification one wants to account for.
The interpretations and the reader responses do not belong to the
structure of the work, yet they are an important cultural activity
that should be studied. And although responses are not objects
that can be analyzed, there are records of interpretations and
responses that semiotics can use. Since communication exists and
interpretations are recorded, one can study literary signification
by describing the conventions and the semiotics operations of
these interpretations. Semiotics would be a theory of reading and
its object would not be the literary works themselves but their
intelligibility, the way in which they make sense and the ways in
which readers have made sense of them.
Yury Lotman: The content and structure of the
concept of literature
The concept of Literature creates a part of the general system of culture.
This concept of literature logically, although not historically precedes
literature itself. There are two points of view from which one may
differentiate between works of literature and the entire mass of other
works. The first one is about the difference in terms of function. The
second one is the terms of the internal organization of the text. According
to the first point of view, any verbal text is capable of functioning an
aesthetic function is counted to literature. The aesthetic text now emerges
as a text whose semantic weighting is greater than that of non-literary
texts.
The literary text always reveals a certain level meaning.
Part of the condition on which a text functions
aesthetically is the recipient's knowledge or his
ignorance of the double coding literary work. In
applying to the work of literature, we deal with a whole
hierarchy of supplementary codes, set of significant
elements, and a complex group of meanings additional
to those of the non-literary text. In the second point of
view, the literary text will have internal organization if
the sender of the information encodes it many times and
in different codes. The recipient must also know that he
deals with a literary text.
Therefore, the text must be semantically organized in some definite
way must contain signals which direct attention to this organization.
Function and internal structure in their diachronic correlation:
there is a phase in which a new system of ideological artistic
codifications is formed of correlations between the structure of the
texts and their function. This means that it is not only the literary
texts which take part in the development of literature. Art being
part of culture, needs non-art for its development. There is a
constant exchange, a complex system of entries and exists, between
the external and the external spheres.