00137--Structuralism.

            Structuralism is an intellectual movement which began in France in the 1950s and is first seen in the work of the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss and the literary critic Roland Barthes.  It is difficult to define structuralism in a 'bottom line' proposition.  The essence of Structuralism is the belief that things can not be understood in isolation-they have to be seen in the context of the larger structures they are part of.  Hence the term structuralism.  Structuralism was imported into Britain mainly in the 1970s.

            The structure in question here are those imposed by our way of perceiving the world and organising experience, rather than objective entities already existing in the external world.  It follows from this that meaning or significance isn't a kind of core or essence inside things: rather, meaning is always outside.  Meaning is always an attribute of things, in the literal sense that meanings are attributed to the things by the human mind, not contained within them.

            Take a poem titled 'Good Morrow' by Donne.  Our immediate reaction as structuralists would probably be to insist that it can only be understood if we first have a clear notion of the genre which it paradies and subverts.  Any single poem is an example of a particular genre.  A poem to its genre is like a phrase spoken in English to the English language as a structure with all its rules, its conventions, and so on.  Donne's poem belong to the genre called alba or 'dawn song', a poetic form dating from the twelfth century in which lovers lament the approach of daybreak because it means that they must part.

            In order to understand alba one should know the notion of the concept of courtly love, and then again the structure of 'poetry' as a whole in which 'Good Morrow' is a part of.  Thus the structrualist 'approach' to the poem is actually taking us away from the very poem, into large and comparatively abstract questions of genre, history, and philosophy rather than closer and closer to it.

            In the structuralist approach to literature there is a constant movement away from the interpretation of the individual literary work and a parallel drive towards understanding the larger, abstract structures that contain them.  These structures are usually abstract such as the notion of the literary or poetic, or the number of narrative itself.