STRUCTURALISM
Structuralism
is an intellectual movement by the influence of the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de
Saussure (1857-1913), that began in France in the 1950s. It was first seen in the works of the
anthropologist Claude Levi Strauss (1908 -2009) and the literary critic Roland
Barthes (1915-1980). It designates the
practice of analyzing and evaluating a work of art on the explicit model of
Structuralist linguistics. It is based on
the concept that things cannot be fully understood in isolation. They have to be seen in the context of larger
structures they are part of. So,
structuralism is a method of interpreting and analyzing literature that focuses
on contrasting ideas and elements of structure and attempts to show how they
relate to the whole structure.
According to Ferdinand de Saussure,
who moved away from the then present historical and philological study of
language to the study of structures, patterns and functions of language,
language is not a naming process by which things get associated with a word or
name. It is a process where the
linguistic sign is made of the union of ‘signifier’ and ‘signified’. The ‘signifier’ is what we call ‘something’. It is the sign’s physical form. The sound, image and the printed word are
signifiers. The word, ‘tree’ for
tree. The ‘signified’ is the meaning,
idea and concept expressed by a sign. It
is the sign’s conceptual aspect. By the
word tree what we mean is ‘signified’.
Apart from these ‘signifier’ and
‘signified’ concept, Saussure’s langue and parole concept too influenced the
structuralists. Langue (language)
referred to the rules behind the way the language is arranged and used. Parole (speech) referred to the actual
utterance of language, both spoken and written.
The structuralists began to illustrate with the help of narratology how
a story’s meaning developed from its overall structure (langue) rather than
from each individual story’s isolated theme (Parole). The structuralists used the semiotic theory
of Saussure too in their critical analysis.
As all the signs in the sign system of language are cultural constructs,
they have taken on their meaning through repeated, learned and collective
use. So, they are arbitrary and relational. The paradigmatic chain in hovel-Shed-hut-house-mansion-palace,
shows that the meaning of each is dependent upon its position in the chain.
Similarly, Binary opposition is also
an important concept of Structuralism.
It is actually the fundamental organizer of human philosophy, culture
and language. According to Saussure,
though binary opposition is actually the presence – absence dichotomy, it is
not a contradictory relation but a structural and a complementary one. It can easily be understood with an example
of good and evil. We cannot conceive of
‘good’ if we don’t understand ‘evil’.
Structuralism was the first school of
psychology that tried to understand the basic elements of consciousness using a
method known as introspection. Edward.
B. Tichener talks about the three elementary stages of consciousness, which are
actually the three components of structuralism.
They are sensations (sights, sounds and tastes), images (components of
thoughts) and affections (components of emotions). So, meaning is always an attribute of
things. The meanings are attributed to
the things by the human mind, not contained within them.
When we are confronted with Donne’s
‘Good Morrow’, it can only be understood if we have a clear notion of the genre
it belongs to. That is the ‘alba’ or
‘dawn song’, a poetic form dating from the 12th century in which the
lovers lament the approach of day break because it means that they must
part. To understand ‘alba’ well, we
should know the concept of courtly love too.
Thus, the structuralist approach, makes the reader move away from the
interpretation of the individual literary work and have a parallel drive
towards understanding the larger, abstract structures that contain them.
Roland Barthes’ ‘Mythologies’,
Jonathan Culler’s ‘Structuralist Poetics’ and Robert Scholes’s ‘Structuralism
in literature’, attracted worldwide attention.
However, by the late 60s, many of the structuralistic concepts attacked
by Jacques Derrida, Louis Althusser and even by Roland Barthes. Though the elements of their works were all
related to structuralism, they began to consider themselves as Post
Structuralists.
------Thulasidharan V
No comments:
Post a Comment