Structuralism is an intellectual movement

Structuralism is an intellectual movement which began in France in the 1950’s.It was first

seen in the works of the anthropologist Levis Strauss and in the early work of Roland Barthes. Saussure’s linguistic model is said to be the origin of structuralism. Later Strauss used it in anthropology to study the structures underlying early societies.

            Structuralism has been applied to linguistics, psychology, sociology, anthropology, folklore, mythology and Biblical studies, in fact to all cultural phenomena. It claims to be scientific and objective. It identifies structures, systems of relationships which give meaning and identities to signs in culture. It shows us the ways in which we think. The structures in question here are those imposed by our way of perceiving the world and organizing experience and not objective entities already existing in the world. It follows from this that meaning or significance is not an essence residing inside things but is outside, in the ways in which we give it meaning through certain codes and conventions. These codes and conventions form the grammar or the structure which generate meanings. Hence, for the structuralist, meaning is constructed through a culturally shared system of signification. In the structuralist approach to literature there is a constant movement away from the interpretation of the individual literary work and a drive towards understanding the larger, abstract structures out of which they evolved. To take a crude example of chicken and egg, for the structuralists determining the precise nature of the chicken (containing structure) is the most important activity and not the egg (the individual text).Thus structuralism is an analytical approach which is less concerned with the unique qualities of any individual example than with the structures that underlie these individual examples.

           

Applying Saussure’s ideas about language to literary texts, structuralists consider texts as a self-sufficient system. They are concerned with the operations of and relations between the signifiers, rather than outside the system of language at the signified. Like the New critics they do not move outside the text to relate it to life. Instead they move in the opposite direction, trying to work out general theories about how texts function. The pure structuralist hopes to establish a grammar of texts, a set of general rules about how texts function.

The structuralist critics work with general ideas about the patterns underlying texts. They look closely at the structure and language of a text and thus make the book’s own form its subject.

They point out how the text might be discussing the gap between the word and the world, the gap between the structure of art and the structure of reality. Structuralist criticism is, by and large, self-reflexive. It points to the limits of literature in representing the complex world. It discusses the problems of writing about reality. These critics analyse prose narratives mainly, relating the text to some larger containing structure such as:

a)  the conventions of a particular literary genre 

b)  a network of intertextual connections 

c)  a projected model of an underlying universal narrative structure 

d)  a notion of narrative as a complex of recurrent patterns or motifs.