00168—What is Structuralism? [Saussure]






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".






00167-- “Nature of the Linguistic Sign” by Ferdinand de Saussure



Ferdinand de Saussure laid the foundation for many developments in linguistics in the 20th century.  He argues that linguistics is a science of signs.  He called it Semiology.  His famous work is called “A Course in General Linguistics”.  It was published three years after his death.  He emphasized a synchronic study of language [How language behaves at a particular point of time].

00166—Feminine, Feminist and Female stages






In her book “A Literature of Their Own” Elaine Showalter writes on English women writers.  She says that we can see patterns and phases in the evolution of a female tradition.  Showalter has divided the period of evolution into three stages.  They are:

1.      the Feminine,
2.      the Feminist, and,
3.      the Female stages.

1)      The first phase, the feminine phase dates from about 1840-1880.  During that period women wrote in an effort to equal the intellectual achievements of the male culture.  The distinguishing sign of this period is the male pseudonym.  This trend was introduced in England in the 1840’s.  It became a national characteristic of English women writers. During this phase the feminist content of feminine art is typically oblique, because of the inferiority complex experienced by female writers. 
2)      The feminist phase lasted about 38 years; from 1882 to 1920.  The New Women movement gained strength—women won the right to vote.  Women writers began to use literature to dramatize the ordeals of wrong womanhood.

3)      The latest phase or the third phase is called the female phase ongoing since 1920.  Here we find women rejecting both imitation and protest.  Showalter considers that both are signs of dependency. Women show more independent attitudes.  They realize the place of female experience in the process of art and literature.  She considers that there is what she calls autonomous art that can come from women because their experiences are typical and individualistic.  Women began to concentrate on the forms and techniques of art and literature.  The representatives of the female phase such as Dorothy Richardson and Virginia Woolf even began to think of male and female sentences.  They wrote about masculine journalism and feminine fiction.  They redefined and sexualized external and internal experience.   




















00165--Comment on "Preface to the Fables" by John Dryden.

Historically, the Age of Dryden is called the Restoration Age.  Charles Ι was executed by Cromwell in 1649.  From 1649 to 1660 there was the domination of the parliament.  During this period, Prince Charles ΙΙ remained in exile in France.  However the English people wanted monarchy back in power.  So in 1660 the monarchy was restored.  Charles ΙΙ was installed on the throne.  This age is therefore called the age of Restoration.  Dryden lived and wrote in this age.  The Restoration age was an age of sweeping reactions against Puritanism and the Glorious Revolution [1688]. 




Fable:  A fable is a brief tale conveying a moral.  Usually, in fables beast and birds are made to act and speak like human beings.  But Dryden’s Fables are in no sense fables, but rather tales in verse.  They are verse paraphrases of tales by Chaucer, Boccaccio and Ovid.
Audio Books

The Background:  In the Preface to the Fables, Dryden explains the background and project of the Fables.  He explains how the project was taken up on a very modest scale which however expanded to the full size of a book.  Metaphorically, Dryden says that he had only planned to build a lodge, but ended up with a house.  
Dryden began with a translation of the first book of Homer’s Iliad. This was done as an experiment.  However it was a great success.  The success gave him confidence and he soon turned to another writer, Ovid.  He translated into simple English Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses’.  These experiments and the success he got, encouraged him to choose five tales from Chaucer’s famous work “Canterbury Tales”.  Later he translated three of Boccaccio’s Tales.  At the end of the preface Dryden says that he makes no claims as to the merits of his translation.  He leaves it to the readers to decide.








00164—What are the views of I. A. Richards on the emotive use of language? OR What does Richards mean by the language of poetry?



When a statement is made for the sake of the effects in emotion and attitude, it is called the emotive use of language.  The word “emotive” is related to emotion.  It is this use of language that is relevant in poetry.  When Iago remarks, “Ah, I like not that!” in the play ‘Othello’ the effect of the simple-seeming statement is far reaching.  It is upon this statement or comment that the whole play moves.  Like a pricking nail the remark troubles Othello.  Similarly the words “I gave commands and all her smiles stopped” [in My Last Duchess by Robert Browning] tell us a lot of things.  Similarly when words are arranged in different ways, a poet can produce various moods: in the play “Julius Caesar”, Mark Antony makes his oratory appealing by the use of irony.  When he continuously says ‘Brutus is an honourable man’, the effect upon the Roman mob is a fine example of the emotive use of language.  They finally declare that Brutus is not honourable.

00163--How did Surrealism contribute to the desacralization of the image of the author?




Surrealism was a French movement of the 1920’s.  Surrealism advocated free creativity.  It allows the hand to exercise full freedom leading to ‘automative writing’.  It does not give the head as much importance as is given to the hand.  Surrealism allows one to violate logical reason, standard, morality, social and artistic conventions and norms.  It aimed to ensure the unhampered operation of the deep mind.


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