Structuralism

Structuralism in linguistics and literary studies found its major starting point in the work of the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, at the turn of the twentieth century. But it was more fully realized--in fact, the term "structuralism" was coined--in the ongoing work in linguistics, Semiotics, and literary analysis of Roman Jakobson. (In this development, structuralism should be seen as a subdivision or a methodological field in the larger area of semiotics that finds its origins in the work of Charles Sanders Peirce as well as in that of Saussure.) In the Course in General Linguistics (1916, trans., 1959, 1983), the transcription by his students of several courses in general linguistics he offered in 1907-11, Saussure called for the "scientific" study of language as opposed to the work in historical linguistics done in the nineteenth century. His work was an attempt to reduce the huge number of facts about language discovered by nineteenth-century historical linguistics to a manageable number of propositions based upon the formal relationships defining and existing between the elements of language. Saussure's systematic reexamination of language is based upon three assumptions: the systematic nature of language, where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts; the relational conception of the elements of language, where linguistic "entities" are defined in relationships of combination and contrast to one another; and the arbitrary nature of linguistic elements, where they are defined in terms of the function and purpose they serve rather than in terms of their inherent qualities. All three of these assumptions gave rise to what Roman Jakobson came to designate as "structuralism" in 1929: Were we to comprise the leading idea of present-day science in its most various manifestations, we could hardly find a more appropriate designation than structuralism. Any set of phenomena examined by contemporary science is treated not as a mechanical agglomeration but as a structural whole, and the basic task is to reveal the inner . . . laws of this system. What appears to be the focus of scientific preoccupations is no longer the outer stimulus, but the internal premises of the development: now the mechanical conception of processes yields to the question of their function. ("Romantic" 711) In this dense passage Jakobson is articulating the scientific aim of linguistics as opposed to simple, "mechanical" accounting. By focusing on the "structural whole," he is articulating all three of Saussure's assumptions. First of all, he is asserting that the scientific study of language needs to examine the system, or "code," of

language rather than its particular "speech-events." Such a systematic study calls for a "synchronic" conception of the relationships among the elements of language at a particular moment of time rather than the "diachronic" study of the development of language through history. Finally, he is also describing the assumption that the basic elements of language are arbitrary and can only be studied in relation to their functions rather than their causes. Such a structural analysis governs the conception of all the elements of language in linguistics, from the "distinctive features" that combine to form phonemes to sentences, paragraphs, and more extended segments of language that combine to form discourse insofar as discourse, in the words of Algirdas Julien Greimas, creates a "meaningful whole" (Structural 59). Perhaps this is clearest in the development of the concepts of the "phonemes" and "distinctive features" of language. But the aim of literary structuralism was to extend the method of structural analysis, focusing rigorously on binary oppositions to discover overarching relationships of combination and contrast in language, to discourses beyond the limit of the sentence-poetry, narratives (including the anonymous narratives of folktales studied in Vladimir Propp's Morphology of the Folktale and the anonymous narratives of myth studied in Claude Lvi-Strauss's "structural anthropology"), film, social formations (including gender and class relations), and wider areas of "semantics" and meaning. Such analyses are based on what Jakobson describes as the fact that language and systems of signification are structured as "both energeia and ergon--in other words, language (or any other social value) as creation and as oeuvre" ("Signum" 179). In this formulation, language is both the process of articulating meaning (signification) and its product (communication), and these two functions of language are neither identical nor fully congruent. Since the elements of language are arbitrary, moreover, neither contrast nor combination can be said to be "basic." Thus, in language distinctive features combine to form contrasting phonemes on another level of apprehension, phonemes combine to form contrasting morphemes, morphemes combine to form words, words combine to form sentences, sentences form paragraphs, paragraphs form (or are) discourses, and so forth. In each instance, the "structural whole" of the phoneme or word or sentence or general signification is greater than the sum of its parts (just as water, H2O, in Saussure's example [Course (1959) 103; (1983) 102] is more than the mechanical agglomeration of hydrogen and oxygen). The three assumptions of structural linguistics I have traced led Saussure to call for a new science that would go beyond linguistic science to study "the life of signs within society." Saussure named this science "semiology (from Greek semeon 'sign')" ([1959] 16). The "science" of semiotics, as it came to be practiced in Eastern Europe in the 1920s and 1930s and Paris in the 1950s and 1960s,

widened the study of language and linguistic structures to literary artifacts constituted (or articulated) by those structures. In this, Prague School Structuralism and French structuralism came to examine meaningful cultural phenomena from the viewpoint of the conditions that make such meaningful phenomena possible, including the structures that give rise to that meaning. But even before the term "structuralism" was coined, many of the principles of structural linguistics (if not the rigorous definitions of structure articulated by Jakobson, Jan Mukarovsky in Prague, and Lvi-Strauss in Paris) influenced Russian Formalism in its study of the particular "effects" of literature produced by the "elements" of literature and narrative. In all these areas, Jakobson is a central figure: as a member of the Moscow Linguistic Circle, he participated in Russian formalism; as an exile in Prague, he helped organize the Prague Linguistic Circle; as an exile in the United States during World War II, he introduced Lvi-Strauss to structural linguistics, which allowed the latter to initiate the structural study of myth and cultural anthropology. An understanding of Russian formalism is important for an understanding of the development of literary structuralism in Prague and Paris, because in focusing on the formal "devices" that create literary effects, it attempted to produce a "science" of literature, in the same way that Saussure attempted to produce a "science" of linguistics. However, Russian formalism assumed that "literature" could be legitimately--that is, "scientifically"--isolated from other cultural phenomena. This assumption led Jakobson, Mukarovsky, and LviStrauss to oppose "structure" to "form" as the central concept of understanding. That is, the opposition, implicit in formalism, between form and content does not allow for a conception of literature as a cultural as well as an aesthetic phenomenon. Structuralism, in contrast, offers a framework of understanding in which what is structured in not simply "content" but rather phenomena already structured on a different "level" of apprehension, so that the isolated content implicit in literary "formalism"--in New Critical formalism as well as in Russian formalism-betrays the dynamic relational nature of meaning. This can be seen, as F. W. Galan has argued, in contrasting Jakobson's 1921 description of the object of study in scientific formalism to his later description as a member of the Prague Linguistic Circle. In 1921 Jakobson claimed that literary study should study "literariness," those isolated forms that make an utterance characteristically "literary," and avoid anything "extraliterary" (such as psychology, politics, or philosophy). In 1933 in Prague, Jakobson modified this position in arguing that the poetic function, or "poeticity," can be viewed as only one constituent part of the complex structure of poetry. "According to Jakobson's structural view, in contrast to his formalist stance," Galan writes, "the difference between art and non-art, or between literary and nonliterary language,

is one not of kind but of degree" (107-8). In other words, "poeticity" (unlike "literariness") is a relational rather than an absolute element of a poetic work. When the poetic function is dominant, Jakobson says, "the word is felt as a word and not a mere representation of the object being named or an outburst of emotion, when words and their composition, their meaning, their external and internal form, acquire a weight and value of their own instead of referring to reality" ("What?" 378, emphasis added). In other words, Jakobson, and Prague semiotics more generally, emphasizes the global cultural existence of literary discourse in emphasizing the existence of "literature" within configurations of cultural significance. In a similar way, French structuralism in the 1950s and 1960s, growing out of the work of LviStrauss in cultural anthropology, also emphasizes the relationship between structuralism and cultural institutions. Lvi-Strauss studied a wide range of myths, mostly Amerindian myths, and attempted to discover the structure--or what might be called the grammar--of mythological narrative. In this work Lvi-Strauss applied the methods of structural linguistics to narrative, so that structural anthropology analyzes narrative discourse in just the way linguistics analyzes sentences. In this endeavor, he articulated the highest ambition of structuralism and semiotics. "I have tried," he says in The Raw and the Cooked, "to transcend the contrast between the tangible and the intelligible by operating from the outset at the sign level. The function of signs is, precisely, to express the one by means of the other" (14). Like Prague structuralism, he attempted to isolate and define the conditions of meaning in culture, to articulate the relationship between the tangible entities of nature and the intelligible meanings of culture. Lvi-Strauss, in his important methodological essays such as "The Structural Study of Myth" and "Structure and Form: Reflections on the Work of Vladimir Propp," as well as in his extensive anthropological work, attempted, as Edmund Leach has noted, to describe the nature of the "human mind" through a kind of structural "algebraic matrix of possible permutations and combinations" (40). This work initiated a literary movement in the 1960s and early 1970s that has proved to be a watershed in modern criticism, causing a major reorientation in literary studies, marked most notably in the United States when Jonathan Culler's Structuralist Poetics won the annual award for an outstanding book of criticism from the Modern Language Association of America in 1975. (The work of Prague structuralism has only reappeared in Western Europe and America after the work of French structuralism [see Steiner x]. In "Structure and Form," for instance, Lvi-Strauss goes back to Propp's contribution to Russian formalism, which antedates the work at Prague.) As a school of literary criticism, French structuralism attempted to explain literature as a system of signs and codes and the conditions that allow that system to

function in a way that emphasizes more than Prague structuralism the essential intelligibility, as Lvi-Strauss says, of the phenomena it studies. For instance, Greimas's Structural Semantics, a book that enlarges the scope of Lvi-Strauss's Structural Anthropology to analyze meaning in general, asserts that "the phenomenon of language as such [may be] mysterious, but there are no mysteries in language" (65). In this, Greimas attempted to "account for" meaning (including literary meaning) as fully and objectively as Saussure's linguistic science attempted to account for the phenomenon of language. The power of structuralism derived, as Roland Barthes said, from its being "essentially an activity" that could "reconstruct an 'object' in such a way as to manifest thereby the rules of functioning" ("Structuralist" 214). By this, Barthes meant that structuralism focused on the synchronic dimension of a text (the system of langue as opposed to its individual speech events, parole), the specific ways in which a text is like other texts. The structural comparison of texts is based on similarities of function (character development, plot, theme, and so forth, as well as the functional definitions of linguistic elements such as finite verbs, pronouns, tenses, and so forth), relationships that Lvi-Strauss called "homologies." The predominantly synchronic analysis of homologies "recreates" the text as a "paradigm," a system of structural possibilities. Following these precepts, Greimas, for example, attempts to reduce the 31 functions of Propp's Morphology of the Folktale to axes of knowledge, desire, and power. In more specific studies of literature, Tzvetan Todorov attempts to describe the "grammar" of narratives (The Poetics of Prose) and to position relationally the "Fantastic" as a genre within a configuration of other literary genres (The Fantastic). The genre of the fantastic in his analysis, like the linguistic elements in Saussure's discussion, is an "entity" of literature precisely because it relates to other so-called entities of literature (which are themselves functions of other relationships). Perhaps the clearest examples of structuralist analyses of literary texts--examples that in their pretense to scientific objectivity most fully seem to avoid the social and temporal contexts of discourse--are the series of analyses of poems that Roman Jakobson published, analyses of such poems as a Shakespeare sonnet and short lyrics by W. B. Yeats, Aleksandr Pushkin, Andrew Marvell, Edgar Allan Poe, and others. (Roland Barthes's structuralist analysis of a biblical narrative, "Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives," and Greimas's book-length study of a single short story by Guy de Maupassant, Maupassant: The Semiotics of Text, could also stand as examples of structural analyses of anonymous and non-anonymous narratives.) In these analyses, Jakobson uses technical linguistic terminology--"finite verbal forms," "coordinate clauses," "grammatical subject," and so forth--to perform a rigorous analysis of the semantics

and syntax of each poem, so that it "emerges," as Victor Erlich has said, "as a system of systems, an intricate web of binary oppositions" (7). These binary oppositions, as Jakobson and Lvi-Strauss note in their structuralist analysis of Charles Baudelaire's "Les Chats," demonstrate that "phenomena of formal distribution obviously have a semantic foundation" (218). In fact, in his headnote to this article, LviStrauss notes that the "superimposed levels" of analysis of the poem--"phonological, phonetic, syntactic, prosodic, semantic, etc."-repeated in his ethnographic analysis of myths insofar as the structuralist method of analysis is repeated, while myths, he argues, "can be interpreted only on the semantic level, the system of variables (always an indispensable part of structural analysis) supplied by the multiplicity of versions of the same myth, that is to say, a cross-section through a body of myths at the semantic level only" (202). Similarly, Jakobson notes in "Poetry of Grammar and Grammar of Poetry" that

any unbiased, attentive, exhaustive, total description of the selection, distribution and interrelation of the diverse morphological classes and syntactic constructions in a given poem surprises the examiner himself by unexpected, striking symmetries and antisymmetries, balanced structures, efficient accumulations of equivalent forms and salient contrasts . . . [which] permit us to follow the masterly interplay of the actualized constituents. (127)

In their analysis of "Les Chats," for example, Lvi-Strauss and Jakobson closely examine the structural oppositions of parts of speech, poetic forms, semantic features (e.g., animate versus inanimate nouns), and so forth, in order to demonstrate that "the different levels on which we touched blend, complement each other or combine to give the poem the value of an absolute object" (217). Such an "absolute" object is what Greimas calls "the still very vague, yet necessary concept of the meaningful whole [totalit de signification] set forth by a message" (Structural 59). It is the phenomenologically

given of meaning that is the object of knowledge for all structuralist analyses. (This can be seen in Jakobson's definition of poeticity in terms of a word being "felt as a word" ["What?" 378].) That given, assumed by Jakobson and Lvi-Strauss, is that meaning is present, unified, and reasonably the object of scientific analysis. The very "effects" of a poem--or, as Lvi-Strauss says, the "profound aesthetic emotions" that myth and, by extension, discourse in general give rise to (Jakobson and Lvi-Strauss 202)--can be subject to rational scientific analysis. Thus, at the end of their analysis they present (in narrative form) the "experience" of the poem, the appearance of "Les Chats" as "a closed system" of grammatical forms and semantic meanings and, simultaneously, "the appearance of an open system in dynamic progression" aiming at "resolving" the felt grammatical/semantic oppositions of the poem between metaphors and metonymies (21819). In more general terms, Lvi-Strauss argues elsewhere (in "The Story of Asdiwal") that the function of mythic discourse is to create the illusory resolution of real cultural contradictions. Such general terms suggest that along with literary studies like those of Jakobson, structuralism expanded the areas subject to rigorous discursive analysis. Barthes's work, for example, charting a course through the early and late stages of structuralism, illuminated semiotic theory, the system of fashion, narrative structure, textuality, and many other topics. Claude Bremond has attempted to trace the "logic" of narrative. Paris school semiotics, following Greimas, has expanded structural analysis to such divergent areas as gestural language, legal discourse, and social science. Further, in semiotic approaches to semantic theory, closely allied to structuralism, there is significant work by Michael Riffaterre, Umberto Eco, Jonathan Culler, and others. In these kinds of analysis, as in Jakobson's linguistic analyses of poetry, structuralism tended to focus on the fixity of relations within synchronic paradigms at the expense of temporality, or the "diachronic" dimension, which involves history. This tendency to avoid dealing with time and social change, a tendency that is much less pronounced in Prague structuralism, concerned many critics of structuralism from its beginning and ultimately became a main component of the "poststructuralist" critique of the scientific goals of structuralism. In this critique, structuralism's strength as an analytical technique is connected to what many conceive to be its major weakness. Its self-imposed limitations, most notable in French structuralism, and especially its lack of concern with diachronic change and its focus on general systems rather than on individual cases, became increasingly evident in the late 1960s. The French philosopher Jacques Derrida offered a particularly decisive critique of Lvi-Strauss in "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences" (1966, in Writing and Difference) and On Grammatology. Derrida

points out that the attempt to investigate structure implies the ability to stand outside and apart from it, which is similar to the methods of formalism that both Prague and French structuralism criticized. In specific terms, Derrida critiqued the privileging in Lvi-Strauss of the opposition between "nature" and "culture." Derrida argues that since one never transcends culture, one can never examine it from the "outside"; there is no standing free of structure, no so-called natural state free of the structural interplay that, in the structuralist analysis, constitutes meaning. For this reason, there is no objective examination of structure, and the attempt to "read" and "interpret" cultural structures cannot be adequately translated into exacting scientific models. Structuralism and semiotics have come to learn from the critique of the structuralist enterprise and its enabling assumption of the opposition between the tangible and the intelligible, nature and culture. The work of Julia Kristeva, like that of Barthes (see, e.g., S/Z [1970, trans., 1974]), both utilizes and goes beyond "structuralism." In such works as Smiotik: Recherches pour une smanalyse (1969), Revolution in Poetic Language (1974, trans., 1984), Powers of Horror (1980, trans., 1982), and Tales of Love (1983, trans., 1987), Kristeva combines the "poststructural" work of Jacques Lacan and Barthes and the earlier critiques of formalism and structural linguistics by M. M. Bakhtin with the achievements of structuralism and semiotics. In fact, the poststructuralist critique of structuralism can be "accounted for" within the methodological framework of structuralism first fully articulated by Saussure. The relational and arbitrary nature of signifying phenomena both call for and also breach the third assumption of structuralism, its systematicity. That is, since the elements of meaning are relationally defined and arbitrary, they demand a structural system for their realization. But those very features of relationality and arbitrariness also continually unweave the structural system. Since language can use anything to articulate its meanings, any "structure" can be recontextualized (relationally and arbitrarily). As Greimas notes in Structural Semantics (which is among the most rigorous and systematic expressions of structuralism), the "edifice" of language "appears like a construction without plan or clear aim" (133). This is because "discourse, conceived as a hierarchy of units of communication fitting into one another, contains in itself the negation of that hierarchy by the fact that the units of communication with different dimensions can be at the same time recognized as equivalent" (82). Another way of seeing this is to note that the two global aims of language described by Saussure--the "articulation" and "communication" of meaning ([1959] 10-14), the structural "processes" and "products" of language that Jakobson mentions--are not fully congruent or compatible (see Schleifer, "Deconstruction"). In this way, then, structuralism, in its scientific study of language and meaning,

anticipates and articulates the terms of its own "poststructuralist" critique. Ronald Schleifer

Notes and Bibliography See also French Theory and Criticism: 5. 1945-1968, Roman Jakobson, Claude Lvi-Strauss, Narratology, Russian Formalism, Ferdinand de Saussure, and Semiotics. Roland Barthes, "lments de smiologie" (1964, Elements of Semiology, trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith, 1967), "Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives" (1966, Image-Music-Text, ed. and trans. Stephen Heath, 1977), "The Structuralist Activity" (1963, Critical Essays, trans. Richard Howard, 1972); Claude Bremond, Logique du rcit (1973); Jacques Derrida, De la grammatologie (1967, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, 1976), L'criture et la diffrence (1967, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass, 1978); A. J. Greimas, Maupassant: The Semiotics of Text: Practical Exercises (1976, trans., 1988), On Meaning: Selected Writings in Semiotic Theory (trans. Paul Perron and Frank Collins, 1987), Smantique structurale: Recherche de mthode (1966, Structural Semantics: An Attempt at Method, trans. Daniele McDowell, Ronald Schleifer, and Alan Velie, 1983); A. J. Greimas and J. Courts, Smiotique: Dictionnaire raisonn de la thorie du langage, vol. 1 (1979, Semiotics and Language: An Analytical Dictionary, trans. Larry Crist et al., 1982); Roman Jakobson, "Poetry of Grammar and Grammar of Poetry," Language and Literature (by Roman Jakobson, ed. Krystyna Pomorska and Stephen Rudy, 1968), "Romantic Panslavism--New Slavic Studies" (1929, Selected Writings, vol. 2, 1971), "Signum et Signatum" (1936, trans. M. Heim, Semiotics of Art: Prague School Contributions, ed. Ladislav Matejka and Irwin R. Titunik, 1976), "What Is Poetry?" (1934, trans. M. Heim, Language and Literature); Roman Jakobson and Claude Lvi-Strauss, "Charles Baudelaire's 'Les Chats'" (1962, trans. Katie Furness-Lane, Introduction to Structuralism, ed. Michael Lane, 1970); Claude Lvi-Strauss, Anthropologie structurale (1958, Structural Anthropology, trans. Clair Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf, 1963), Mythologiques I: Le Cru et la cuit (1964, The Raw and the Cooked, trans. John Weightman and Doreen Weightman, 1975), "The Story of Asdiwal" (1962, trans. N. Mann, rev. Monique Layton, Structural Anthropology, vol. 2, 1976), "The Structural Study of Myth" (1955, Structural Anthropology), "Structure and Form: Reflections on a Work by Vladimir Propp" (1960, trans. Monique Layton, rev. Anatoly Liberman, Theory and History of Folklore, by Vladimir Propp, 1984); Richard Macksey and Eugenio

Donato, eds., The Structuralist Controversy: The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man (1970); Ferdinand de Saussure, Cours de linguistique gnrale (1916, Course in General Linguistics, trans. Wade Baskin, 1959, trans. Roy Harris, 1983); Tzvetan Todorov, Introduction la littrature fantastique (1970, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, trans. Richard Howard, 1973), Potique de la prose (1971, The Poetics of Prose, trans. Richard Howard, 1977). Art Berman, From the New Criticism to Deconstruction: The Reception of Structuralism and Post-Structuralism (1988); Jonathan Culler, The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction (1981), Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics, and the Study of Literature (1974); Robert Con Davis and Ronald Schleifer, Criticism and Culture: The Role of Critique in Modern Literary Theory (1992); Alan Dundes, "From Etic to Emic in the Structural Study of Myth," Journal of American Folklore 75 (1962); Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983); Victor Erlich, "Roman Jakobson: Grammar of Poetry and Poetry of Grammar," Approaches to Poetics (ed. Seymour Chatman, 1973); F. W. Galan, Historical Structures: The Prague School Project, 1928-1946 (1985); Terence Hawkes, Structuralism and Semiotics (1977); Fredric Jameson, The Prison-House of Language: A Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian Formalism (1972); Edmund Leach, Lvi-Strauss (1970, rev. ed., 1974); Ronald Schleifer, A. J. Greimas and the Nature of Meaning: Linguistics, Semiotics, and Discourse Theory (1987), "Analogy and Example: Heisenberg and the Language of Quantum Physics," Criticism 33 (1991), "Deconstruction and Linguistic Analysis," College English 49 (1987), Rhetoric and Death: The Language of Modernism and Postmodern Discourse Theory (1990); Robert Scholes, Structuralism in Literature: An Introduction (1974); Peter Steiner, ed., The Prague School: Selected Writings, 19291946 (trans. John Burbank et al., 1982); John Sturrock, ed., Structuralism and Since: From Lvi-Strauss to Derrida (1979).

Topics Index Cross-references for this Guide entry: anthropology, grammar, langue/parole, literariness, metonymy, semantics, structural linguistics, synchrony/diachrony