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| Saussure sign |
Structuralism is primarily concerned with the study of
structures. Here we study how things get
their meaning. It is also a
philosophical approach. The whole world
has a set up. Similarly the solar system
has a structure with the sun at the centre.
Even an atom has its own structure which resembles our solar
system. Coming to the political set up,
a democratic structure is the basis of our govt. [Indian govt.]. Communism has its own set up or
structure. Coming to an individual’s
life a person has different names according to the nature of the
structure. A boy in a class room is a
student. At home he is a son. In the cricket ground he is a player, and
when he gets a job, he gets another name.
Another point Saussure discovered is that the meaning
of a sign is arbitrary. The same flower,
say rose, has different names in different languages, but its qualities remain
the same. Saussure points out that a
word assumes different meanings according to the particular structure in which
it is a part. When Yeats sings “Whenever
green is found,” it means the Irish flag which is green in colour. So the word ‘’green” represents
patriotism. In the phrase ‘green
revolution’ the word green stands for agriculture.
Further Reading:
Structuralist
Criticism= Almost all literary theorists since Aristotle have
emphasized
the importance of structure, conceived in diverse ways, in analyzing
a
work of literature. "Structuralist criticism," however, now
designates the
practice
of critics who analyze literature on the explicit model of structuralist
linguistics.
The class includes a number of Russian formalists, especially
Roman
Jakobson, but consists most prominently of a group of writers, with
their
headquarters in Paris, who applied to literature the concepts and analytic
distinctions
developed by Ferdinand de Saussure in his Course in General
Linguistics
(1915).
This mode of criticism is part of a larger movement, French
structuralism,
inaugurated
in the 1950s by the cultural anthropologist
Claude
Lévi-Strauss, who analyzed, on Saussure's linguistic model, such cultural
phenomena
as mythology, kinship relations, and modes of preparing
food.
In
its early form, as manifested by Lévi-Strauss and other writers in the
1950s
and 1960s, structuralism cuts across the traditional disciplinary areas of
the
humanities and social sciences by undertaking to provide an objective account
of
all social and cultural practices, in a range that includes mythical
narratives,
literary texts, advertisements, fashions in clothes, and patterns of
social
decorum. It views these practices as combinations of signs that have a
set
significance for the members of a particular culture, and undertakes to
make
explicit the rules and procedures by which the practices have achieved
their
cultural significance, and to specify what that significance is, by reference
to
an underlying system (analogous to Saussure's langue, the implicit
system
of
a particular language) of the relationships among signifying elements
and
their rules of combination. The elementary cultural phenomena, like the
linguistic
elements in Saussure's exposition, are not objective facts identifiable
by
their inherent properties, but purely "relational" entities; that is,
their
identity
as signs are given to them by their relations of differences from, and
binary
oppositions to, other elements within the cultural system. This system
of
internal relationships, and of "codes" that determine significant
combinations,
have
been mastered by each person competent within a given culture,
although
he or she remains largely unaware of its nature and operations. The
primary
interest of the structuralist, like that of Saussure, is not in the cultural
parole
but
in the langue; that is, not in any particular cultural phenomenon or
event
except as it provides access to the structure, features, and rules of the
general
system that engenders its significance.
As
applied in literary studies, structuralist criticism views literature as
a
second-order
signifying system that uses the first-order structural system of
language
as its medium, and is itself to be analyzed primarily on the model of
linguistic
theory. Structuralist critics often apply a variety of linguistic concepts
to
the analysis of a literary text, such as the distinction between phonemic
and
morphemic levels of organization, or between paradigmatic and
syntagmatic
relationships;
and some critics analyze the structure of a literary
text
on the model of the syntax in a well-formed sentence. The undertaking of
a
thoroughgoing literary structuralism, however, is to explain how it is that a
competent
reader is able to make sense of a particular literary text by specifying
the
underlying system of literary conventions and rules of combination
that
has been unconsciously mastered by such a reader. The aim of classic literary
structuralism,
accordingly, is not (as in New Criticism) to provide interpretations
of
an individual text, but to make explicit, in a quasi-scientific way,
the
tacit grammar (the system of rules and codes) that governs the forms and
meanings
of all literary productions. As Jonathan Culler put it in his lucid exposition,
the
aim of structuralist criticism is "to construct a poetics which
stands to
literature as linguistics stands to language".
