Download Structural Linguistics. General Principles

Structuralism
Structuralism still claims to yield the systematic and law governed description. Structuralism is in many
ways a continuation of formalism or a further professionalization of formalism. It is, like formalism,
fundamentally linguistic, i.e. language oriented. It rejects mimetic statements, it rejects pragmatic
statement, it also rejects expressive statements. It is an essentially objective theory of literature. The safe
side is, of course, the factual side. In order to escape all political ramifications, one needs to deny the
significance of the concrete utterance of the text. Shklovsky had already made this acceptable by saying
that "the artifact itself is quite unimportant." Instead, what literary scholars, according to Structuralism,
should be interested in is the system, the general working of literature, in other words: its structure.
Early in the century Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure’s innovative course at Geneva
overturned the orthodox views of German philology and laid the basis for a new approach not just to
linguistics, but to anthropology and sociology as well. De Saussure had been a part of that movement that
launched the investigation of the Asiatic origins of European languages. The quest for the original Urlanguage that united European languages with ancient Greek and Sanskrit was one that had gripped the
imagination of German philologists like Adam Muller. However, this program, rich as it was, was also
replete with political motivations that called its objectivity into question. The model of linguistic
dissemination implied a hierarchy of races, with an Aryan superiority. The contest for national proximity to
the Ur-language was a one for authenticity that diverged from a purely scientific investigation.
His Course does not reject outright the investigations of the philologists - much of these were real
advances. What he does is to challenge some of the suspect methodological assumptions. So for example
the idea that languages that are closer to the original are in any way superior is rejected by him as
unscientific. Furthermore, he demonstrates, linguistic similarities do not necessarily arise from direct
borrowing. Languages may be similar in structure of syntax and yet share no common origin of even
influence.
Thus Saussure broke with the 19th century tradition of looking at language in a historical way (how
languages have grown out of others), and suggested studying the abstract structure of a language (langue)
instead of concrete acts or utterances (parole). Saussure distinguished between a syntagmatic axis of
language (the grammar) and a paradigmatic axis (the semantics). This distinction is what led Roman
Jakobson to his famous statement that in literature both axis work with the principle of similarity.
But what was even more interesting in Saussure's discovery was the working of semantics itself.
How does meaning come about? How do we signify to each other? Since antiquity it was clear that we use
signs, for example the word 'chair' for this furniture to sit on. But how do we know that a chair is a chair?
We know that the bible had suggested that Adam and Eve had chosen the words, but at that time English
didn't exist yet. Linguists had tried to solve that enigma for hundreds of years. Some argued for
onomatopoetic similarities and for a development of writing out of iconic, i.e. picture signs. Saussure came
up with a simple and ingenius answer: a chair is a chair because it is not a fair. In other words: Saussure
suggested that signs are entirely arbitrary, that there is no relation between a sign and its meaning. Instead,
Saussure argued, language is pure form. It works through internal differences, for example the distinction
between 'ch' and 'f', two different phonemes which do not have any meaning, but they establish meaning
difference, as for example between chair and fair.
Thus, Saussure said, a sign has two parts, like the two sides of a piece of paper: the signifier (the
spoken word or the letters) and the signified, the meaning. By social contract, the signifier is unfailingly
bound to the signified, but the internal relation is arbitrary. But that means that a sign does not acquire its
meaning by its relation to reality, but by its relation to other signs. And this relation is always established by
at least one fundamental binary opposition: like for instance voiced and unvoiced.
Saussure rejects the conception of language as one of simple correspondence to the physical
world. Words, he says exist primarily in relation to one another, before they exist in relation to an object. It
is the relation of sign to the code of signification that accords it meaning, rather than a simple
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correspondence with an external object. Again de Saussure shows through looking at linguistic variation
and innovation that distinctions within the language have a knock on effect upon other terms, tenses,
prefixes and so on, that means that any singular innovation necessarily impacts upon the whole code of
language, or its structure (hence his linguistics are sometimes called structural). Here de Saussure was
taking language out of the realm of logic, to look at language and its grammar as an object of study in its
own right.
 Structural Linguistics. General Principles
1. Meaning occurs through difference. Meaning is not identification of the sign with object in the real world
or with some pre-existent concept or essential reality; rather it is generated by difference among signs
in a signifying system.
2. Relations among signs are of two sorts, contiguity and substitutability, the axes of combination and
selection: hence the existence of all 'grammars', hence all substitutions, hence the ability to know
something by something else, or by a part of it in some way -- hence metonymy and metaphor. The
conception of combination and selection provides the basis for an analysis of 'literariness' or
'poeticality' in the use, repetition and variation of sound patterns and combinations. It also provides
keys to the most fundamental elements of culture. Premise Anti-humanism:The author is dead.
3. Structuralism notes that much of our imaginative world is structured of, and structured by, binary
oppositions (being/nothingness, hot/cold, culture/nature, Saussure's langue and parole- the language
system of rules and the individual utterance; sign=signifier+signified); these oppositions structure
meaning, and one can describe fields of cultural thought, or topoi, by describing the binary sets which
compose them.
4. Structuralism forms the basis for semiotics, the study of signs: a sign is a union of signifier and
signified, and is anything that stands for anything else. sign = signifier—signified= sign—referent. The
relation between is arbitrary in that it actually has no natural connection with the signified. Meaning is
not fixed. A signifier means by its difference from the other signifiers. Saussure:"The linguistic sign
unites, not a thing and a name, but a concept and a sound-image. . . The two elements are intimately
united, and each recalls the other. signifier + signified -referent triad: The inclusion of the concept within
the triad of signification suggests that there is no natural or immediate relation between the words and
the 'thing.' In Saussure's model, the arbitrary linking of signifier and signified is forgotten in the practice
of actual speakers who behave as if a sign were a perfect unity, but in Lacan and others the signifier's
arbitrariness determines the whole operation of signification.
 Structural Poetics
Roman Jakobson's metaphor and metonymy
His study of aphasia: two major kinds of disorder--'similarity disorder' and 'continguity disorder'
He relates these two kinds to the two basic rhetoric figures: metaphor and metonymy. Linguistic signs, for
him, are formed through the two-fold process of "selection" and "combination."
(From Barthes Structuralism and Semiotics p. 78)
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Jacobson's methodology:
1. discover the distributive pattern which link the stanzas of poems in a variety of combinations;
2. shows that the central lines are a some way distinguished and set off from the rest.
 Structuralist analysis of narrative (narratology):
Narrative Structure: Vladmir Propp and Greimas
While Propp focused on a single genre, Greimas aims to arrive at the universal 'grammar' of narrative by
applying to it a semantic analysis of sentence structure
Syntax as the basic model for their analysis: Suject + predicate = Actant + function
For Propp there are seven 'sphere of action' (villain, hero, false hero, donor[provider], helper,
dispatcher, princess [and her father].); three pairs of binary oppositions including six roles
(actants)--Subject/Object, Sender/ Receiver, Helper/Opponent- and three basic patterns: 1. Desire,
search, or aim, 2. communication 3. Auxiliary support or hindrance. In total 31 functions grouped
into 3 structures (symtagms): contractual, performative, disjunctive. This kind of structuralist
analysis is useful on popular cultural products or shorter texts for characters can break these
categories.
Like Propp, Greimas argues for a 'grammar' of narrative, ...But unlike Propp, he sees the story as a
semantic structure analogous to the sentence and yielding itself to an appropriate kind of analysis.
He refines and develops Propp's work Example: "The Purloined Letter"; three pairs of actants:
Helper/Opponent, Sender/Reciever, Subject/Object and three basic patterns of action: contractive,
disjunctive, and performative. He is also more truly 'structuralist' in that the former thinks in terms of
relations between entities rather than of the character of entities themselves.
Greimas' semiotic rectangle: four terms, instead of two. e.g. "The Purloined Letter" See
Structuralism and Semiotics (below).
Thematic Structure: scapegoat; Oedipus complex (e.g. model: Levi Strauss's over-evaluation of kinship and
under-evaluation of kindship )
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Structure of Narration (narrator-narratee)
Genette
text, story, narration
tense: order, duration, frequency
mood: distance and perspective (focus) --regulation of information
voice: time of narrating, narrative levels (the level of the story, the level of the narrating), and
"person"
Jonathan Culler (The Pursuit of Signs)
Story and discourse.
A distinction should be made between the sequence of events and the way they are told. The critic should
also decide if the former's revelation depends on the latter. For example, in the story of Oedipus the King,
Oedipus admits to killing the king after he knows that he is the king's son, whereas in the witness's account
it's "three robbers" that kills the king, but not three "travellers." Seymour Chatman ("What Novels Can Do
That Films Can't [and Vice Versa]") uses the distinction between the story time and discourse time to talk
about the differences between film narration and novelististic narration. He argues that films (because of
the illusion of motion, or visual continuity) cannot really stop and describe, whereas novels can.
 Structuralism and Semiotics (theory of signs)
reference: Barthes’ Structuralism and Semiotics (see Guías de Lectura )
Central too to semiotics is the idea of codes, which give signs context -- cultural codes, literary
codes, etc. The study of semiotics and of codes opens up literary study to cultural study, and expands the
resources of the critic in discussing the meaning of texts. Structuralism, says, Genette, "is a study of the
cultural construction or identification of meaning according to the relations of signs that constitute the
meaning-spectrum of the culture."
Greimas defines semiotics as "a hierarchy that can be subjected to analysis and the elements of
which can be determined by reciprocal relations (and by communication)" (22)...a semiotics exits only as a
possibility of description and the system of relations described does not depend on the nature of the signs
by which the external or internal world is manifested. ...such theories attempt to account for the articulation
and of manifestation of the semantic universe as a totality of meaning belonging to the cultural or personal
order. (64)
Greimas' semiotics seeks to account for the articulation and the narrativization of the semantic
universe as a totality of meaning. Similar to the distinction between langue and parole in Saussurian
linguistics, in Greimas' semiotics there is the distinction between the deep (semantic) structure and surface
syntax, only the latter can be further divided into narrative structure (surface structure) and discoursive
structure (the structure of manifestation). The process of narrativization goes through a series of conversion
horizontally from the fundamental semantics to fundamental syntax and vertically from fundamental syntax
to surfface narrative syntax and then to discoursive syntax. The object of semiotics, to Greimas, is this
process of transformation, which is the production of meaning.
This system of the different levels of structures, or semiotics, to Greimas, is "a hierarchy that can
be subjected to analysis and the elements of which can be determined by reciprocal relations (and by
communication)" (xxvi). Central to this system is the semiotic square in the deep semantic structure, the
perception of an idea (S) with its opposition (-S) and negation (S1). In Jameson's interpretation, "the
semiotic rectangle or 'elementary structure of signification' is the representation of a binary opposition or of
two contraries (S and -S), along with the simple negations or contradictories of both terms (the so-called
subcontraries S1and -S1): significant slots are constituted by the various possible combination of these
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terms, mostly notably the 'complex' term (or ideal synthesis of the two contraries) and the 'neutral term' (or
ideal synthesis of the two subcontraries)" (The Political Unconscious 166; Cf. Prinson-House 162-66). This
elementary structure, according to Greimas, should be considered "on the one hand, as a concept uniting
the minimal condition for the apprehension and/or the production of signification, and on the other hand, as
a model containing the minimal definition of any language..and of any semiotic unit." In other words, the
semiotic square, "the universal" for Greimas, is the basic mode of signification both in human thinking and
all forms of discourse including the narrative.
The semiotic square (the main object of the theory of the semiotic square is to articulate the
substance of the content and therein constitute the form of the content) defines relations of the four terms
but not their content; it is comprehensible only when converted into actantial syntax. In the narrative, there
are three pairs of actants as binary oppositions--Subject/Object, Sender/ Receiver, Helper/Opponent.
These pairs establish relations between subjects and objects that recur in all narratives:
1. Wanting (e.g. desire, search, or aim),
2. Exchange (e.g. communication)
3. contradiction (e.g. Auxiliary support or hindrance).
Furthermore, from the various narrative sequences, Greimas sees three basic structures: the
contractual, the performative and the disjunctive.
The central operation of Greimas' semiotics is, on the one hand, the description of signification as a
process of conversion from the deep structure to the surface syntax, and on the other the analysis of
linguistic or verbal texts through the "semiotic reduction" to their more fundamental mechanisms of
meaning. One problem of his semiotics, Greimas himself admits, is that the actual procedures of
conversion from one level to another still needs to be elaborated. This, however, is not the major problem
of his semiotics in the field of literary studies. Greimas' semiotic reduction fails to account for the multiplicity
of meanings produced in the process of conversion from deep structure to surface structures; instead, it
reduces the text to a single meaning, which is only one interpretation of the text. As Jameson puts it, "when
such reduction has been achieved, ...all we have are other words and other meanings, another text, a set
of terms that...are open to all the drift and force fields of philosophy and psychology..." (ix).
Moreover, Greimas' semiotics seems applicable to traditional narrative, but not to some modern
fiction which denies the concept of plot as a linear and causal sequence, nor the postmodern fiction which
exposes its meaning-production as artificial and infinitely regressive.
Although problematic in its practice, Greimas' semiotics helps explain the influence and limitation of
ideology on human signification. First of all, the semantic universe that exists before individual utterances is
in fact the ideologies that exist prior to individual will. Human signification, therefore, is not producing a new
meaning free from its socio-economic context, but merely transformation of meaning as "always-alreadygiven" by ideologies into another meaning. Second, the semiotic square, in playing out ten possibilities of
one term, shows the limitation of that term. In this sense, the semiotic square "constitutes a virtual map of
conceptual closure, or ...of the closure of ideology itself." In other words, the semiotic constraint on
individual utterances is also the ideological constraint on human signification
Roland Barthes regards all social practices as sign-systems which operate on the model of
language (the world of clothes, advertisements, etc). Any actual 'speech' presupposes a system (langue)
which is being used. Some signs carry with them larger cultural meanings, usually very general. Barthes
calls these "myths", or second-order signifiers. Anything can be a myth. For example, two-story pillars
supporting the portico of a house are a mythic signifier of wealth and elegance. primary signification +
secondary signification (my intention, social conventions: e.g. in myth, literature, advertisement) signifier +
signified = sign (full)--denotation (empty) form + content = sign --connotation
sign (rose) = signifier (rose) + signified (passion)
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For Barthes, "semiotic reduction" aims at rewriting a verbal or linguistic text into more fundamental
mechanisms of meaning. Binary opposition is the basic human conceptual mode. "Narrative is thereby
triumphantly demonstrated to be a form of thinking, but at a heavy price, namely, its rewriting, reduction, or
transformation back into abstract thinking and its tokens or counters" “When such reduction has been
achieved, ...all we have are other words and other meanings, another text, a set of terms ...of texts and
linguistic and conceptual operations if anything even more complex than the original verbal object to be
thereby "reduced".--it constitutes a virtual map of conceptual closure, or ...of the closure of ideology
itself...as a mechanism can "reduce" a narrative in movement to a series of "cognitive" or ideological,
combinatory positions; or it can rewrite a cognitive text into a desperate narrative movement in which new
positions are generated and abandoned.
This elementary structure should be considered "on the one hand, as a concept uniting the minimal
condition for the apprehension and/or the production of signification, and on the other hand, as a model
containing the minimal definition of any language and of any semiotic unit"
The object of semiotics, the process of transformation--of the production of meaning
meaning: always-already-given in the process of transformation into another meaning
"The production of meaning is meaningful only if it is the transformation of a meaning already given; the
production of meaning is consequently a signifying endowment with form indifferent to whatever content it
may be called on to transform."
(for a extended discussion of Barthes’ Elements of Semiology see Guías de Lectura)

Structuralism and Anthropology
Claude Lévi-Strauss saw parallels between Saussure’s findings in linguistics and recent
developments in anthropology. The concept of culture as something that is disseminated from the master
races down to the latter was already irksome to anthropologists working in the field. Trying to fulfil idealized
justifications of white supremacy was not a motivation that took anthropologists very far.
Already, the sociology of Emile Durkhein had suggested an alternative approach. A 'functionalist'
approach, taken from Durkheim meant that it was now possible to look at the rituals, taboos, and mores of
primitive societies without trying seeing them judgementally. Instead it was possible to look at such
institutions from the standpoint of their functionality to those societies. Durkheim's nephew, the
anthropologist Marcel Mauss pioneered the functionalist analysis in his study of the role of symbolic gifts
amongst Native Americans (these ostentatious shows of gift-making performed the function of disposing of
a potentially disruptive surplus produce, Mauss explained in his Essai sur le don). This less judgmental and
more objective approach was already being taken up by American anthropologists like Boas and his
students.
Lévi-Strauss realized that Saussure’s approach meant that it was possible to go further than
Durkheim’s functionalism. Not just language, but culture itself could be looked upon as a code of meaning
in de Saussure's sense. The functionalist approach meant isolating particular institutions and trying to find
parallels between those and modern institutions. But this meant that other cultures were still seen simply as
version of our own. By looking at the entire cultural code of a culture, the way that its different mores and
taboos interact and support each other, Levi-Strauss was able to develop a fuller understanding.
The structuralist approach to anthropology was so productive that its influence was not restricted to
anthropologists. Not that Lévi-Strauss influence upon that discipline was not profound. From the New
School in New York after the war, and from France in the 1950s Levi-Strauss influenced anthropologists
like Evans-Pritchard in England and Pierre Bourdieu in Algeria. Beyond his colleagues, though, Strauss's
highly readable work impacted upon students of popular culture and society more widely.
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Roland Barthes extended the analysis of codes of signification to analyse popular culture. Barthes was
interested in escaping the obligation to committed writing, and structuralism seemed like an alternative. In
his hands, de Saussure and Strauss's structuralism became a full blown 'science of signs' or semiology.
Meanwhile the Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser utilised the structuralist approach to distance himself
from the Hegelian methodology he so resented in Marx's work.
For both Barthes and Althusser, structuralism was an alternative to traditional, liberal concepts of
the subject. In Barthes case it was the 'intentional fallacy' of authorship that was to be overthrown. Barthes
reversed the commonsense view that authors wrote texts to argue - cryptically - that texts 'wrote' authors.
What he meant was that specific genres of literature pre-existed the authors that contributed to them.
Fulfilling the code of the genre, the author is an effect of the discourse, not its originator. The slogan of
semiotics became 'The death of the author'.
For Althusser too, the subject was overthrown as a category of social science. His analysis of
ideologies sought to show how these 'interpellated' the subject - meaning to say that the illusion of personal
agency was an effect of the ideology. As if trying to fulfil the Cold War caricature of Marxism as an
impersonal, objectivist science, Althusser gleefully excised any hint of subjectivity from the social sciences,
in favour of an analysis of the ideological structures that generated 'the subject'. The slogan of Althusserian
structuralism was 'The death of the subject'.
 Structuralism and the Subject
Structuralism introduces the idea of the 'subject', as opposed to the idea of the individual as a stable
indivisible ego. The term 'subject' foregrounds the relationship between ethnology, psychoanalysis, and
semiotics. It helps us to conceive of human reality as a construction, as the product of signifying activities
which are both culturally specific and generally unconscious. The category of the subject thus calls into
question the notions both of the private, and of a self synonymous with consciousness. It suggests that
even desire is culturally instigated, and hence collective; and it de-centers consciousness, relegating it....to
a purely receptive capacity. Finally, by drawing attention to the divisions which separate one area of
psychic activity from another, the term 'subject' challenges the value of stability attributed to the individual.
The value of the conception is that it allows us to 'open up', conceptually, the inner world of humans, to
see the relation of human experience to cultural experience, to talk cogently of meaning as something that
is structured into our 'selves' (Kaja Silverman in The Subject of Semiotics). There is no attempt here to
challenge the meaningfulness of persons; there is an attempt to dethrone the ideology of the ego, the idea
that the self is an eternal, indivisible essence, and an attempt to redefine what it is to be a person. The self
is, like other things, signified and culturally constructed. Post-structuralism, in particular, will insist that the
subject is de-centered.
The conception of the constructed subject opens up the borders between the conscious and the
unconscious. The unconscious itself is not some strange, impenetrable realm of private meaning but is
constructed through the sign-systems and through the repression of the culture. Both the self and the
unconscious are cultural constructs.
In the view of structuralism our knowledge of 'reality' is not only coded but also conventional, that is,
structured by and through conventions, made up of signs and signifying practices. This is known as "the
social construction of reality."
There is, then, in structuralism, a coherent connection among the conceptions of reality, the social, the
individual, the unconscious: they are all composed of the same signs, codes and conventions, all working
according to similar laws.
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 Structuralism, culture and texts
Structuralism enables both the reading of texts and the reading of cultures: through semiotics,
structuralism leads us to see everything as 'textual', that is, composed of signs, governed by conventions of
meaning, ordered according to a pattern of relationships.
Structuralism enables us to approach texts historically or trans-culturally in a disciplined way.
Whenever we have to look more objectively, when we are transversing barriers of time, say, or of culture or
interest, then the structural method, the search for principles of order, coherence and meaning, become
dominant.
This sort of study opens up for serious cultural analysis texts which had hitherto been closed to such
study because they did not conform to the rules of literature, hence were not literature but 'popular writing'
or 'private writing' or 'history' and so forth. When the rules of literary meaning are seen as just another set
of rules for a signifying arena of a culture, then literature loses some aspects of its privileged status, but
gains in the strength and cogency of its relationship to other areas of signification. Hence literary study has
expanded to the study of textuality, popular writing has been opened up to serious study, and the grounds
for the relationship between the meaning-conventions of literature and the way in which a culture imagines
reality have been set, and we can speak more clearly of the relation of literary to cultural (or, 'human', or
'every-day') meanings.
As everything that can be known, can be known by virtue of its belonging to a signifying system, then
everything can be spoken of as being textual.
All documents can be studied as texts -- for instance, history or sociology can be analyzed the way
literature can be.
All of culture can be studied as text. Anthropology, among other fields, is revolutionized through
ethnography; qualitative rather than quantitative study becomes more and more the norm in many areas of
social science.
Belief-systems can be studied textually and their role in constructing the nature of the self understood.
Consequently much greater attention is paid to the nature of language-use in culture. Language-use
relating to various social topics or areas of engagement has become known as "discourse." Although
"discourse" is a term more prevalent in post-structuralist thinking, it is of its nature a structuralist
development.
 Structuralism and literature. The Archetypal School of Criticism
Just as Lévi-Strauss studied the oppositional structures in the mythology of primitive tribes, and
demonstrated that all mythologies of primitive people actually are the same their deep structure is identical,
even though their surface structure (the stories we read) is the same, the Canadian scholar Northrope
Frye tried to do something similar for literature. His kind of criticism was called the myth and symbol school
or archetypal criticism, because Frye also reduced the deep structure of all literature to a circular system of
possibilities.
In Frye's system all utterances of world literature are in the end assimilated to one or the other
archetypal meaning, differentiated by mode (tragic or comic), by extent (episodic or encyclopedic), and by
certain aesthetic, thematic and existential parameters.
Frye's totalitarian system is only the most extreme of structuralist practices. Generally, structuralists
tried and still try to describe surface structures from a deep structure through generative principles. For
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instance the transformations in narrative from events to story to plot to narration (Gerard Genette); narrative
grammars developed from the confrontation of certain types of characters (hero, helper, villain, messenger
etc.) as deviced by Greimas and Propp; temporal structures from story time to discourse time through
analepses and prolepses (Gerard Genette), perspectival structures from who speaks (narration) to who
sees (focalization). All of these structural devices and methods of analysis have fundamentally
professionalized literary scholarship. But the idea that language, mythology, literature and so on form giant
closed structures, which help us solve the problem of meaning of individual elements in that structure, not
only yielded an immense output in results, but it also created a whole lot of problems. Those problems are
the basis of post-structuralist theories...
In extending the range of the textual we have not decreased the complexity or meaning-power of
literature but have in fact increased it, both in its textual and in its cultural meaningfulness. If the reader and
the text are both cultural constructions, then the meaningfulness of texts becomes more apparent, as they
share meaning-constructs; if the cultural is textual, then the culture's relation to the textuality of literature
becomes more immediate, more pertinent, more compelling. Literature is a discourse in a world of
discourses, each discourse having its protocols for meaning and typical uses of language, rhetoric, subject
area and so forth.
The thesis that what seems real to us is coded and conventional leads to a consideration of how
'reality' is represented in art -- what we get is a 'reality effect'; the signs which represent reality are
'naturalized', that is, made to seem as if we could see reality through them -- or in another way of saying,
made to seem to be conforming to the laws of reality. This is achieved through 'vraisemblance', truthseeming, or 'naturalization'. Some elements of vraisemblance (from Culler, Structuralist Poetics) are as
follows.
There is the socially given text, that which is taken as the 'real' world -- what is taken for granted. That
we have minds and bodies, for instance. This is a textual phenomenon. (Every term of "we have minds and
bodies", the relations between most of these terms, and what we mean by them, in fact codify culturally
specific assumptions.)
There is the general cultural text: shared knowledge which would be recognized by participants as part
of culture and hence subject to correction or modification but which none the less serves as a kind of
'nature'. This is the level at which we interpret motive, character and significance from descriptions of
action, dress, attitude and so forth.
One convention of literature is that there is a persona who is articulating the text -- that it comes from
some organizing consciousness which can be commented on and described. Genre is another convention:
each genre designates certain kinds of action as acceptable and excludes others.
There is what might be called the natural attitude to the artificial, where the text explicitly cites and exposes
vraisemblance of the kind directly above, so as to reinforce its own authority. The narrator may claim that
he is intentionally violating the conventions of a story, for instance, that he knows that this is not the way it
should be done according to the conventions, but that the way he is doing it serves some higher or more
substantial purpose -- the appeal is to a greater naturalness or a higher intelligibility.
There is the complex vraisemblance of specific intertextualities. "When a text cites or parodies the
conventions of a genre one interprets it by moving to another level of interpretation where both terms of the
opposition can be held together by the theme of literature itself." -- e.g. parody, when one exploits the
particular conventions of a work or style or genre, etc. Irony forces us to posit an alternate possibility or
reality in the face of the reality-construction of the text. All surface incongruities register meaning at a level
of the project of interpretation itself, and so comment as it were on the relation between 'textual' and
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'interpretive' reality. In short, to imitate reality is to represent codes which 'describe' (or, construct) reality
according to the conventions of representation of the time.
The conventions of reading. We read according to certain conventions; consequently our reading
creates the meaning of that which we read. These conventions come in two 'layers': how we (culturally)
think that reality is or should be represented in texts, which will include the general mimetic conventions of
the art of the period, which will describe the way in which reality is apprehended or imagined, and the
conventions of 'literature' (and of 'art' generally), for instance, the rule of significance whereby we raise the
meaning of the text to its highest level of generalization (a tree blasted by lightning might become a figure
of the power of nature, or of God); the convention of figural coherence, through which we assume that
figures (metonyms, metaphors, 'symbols') will have a signifying relationship to one another on a level of
meaning more complex than or 'higher' than the physical; the convention of thematic unity, whereby we
assume that all of the elements of the text contribute to the meaning of the text. These are all conventions
of reading.
The facts that some works are difficult to interpret, some are difficult to interpret for its
contemporaries but not for later readers, some require that we learn how its contemporaries would have
read them in order fully to understand them, these facts point to the existence of literary competence, the
possession by the reader of protocols for reading. Culler remarks that reading poetry is a rule-governed
process of producing meanings; the poem offers a structure which must be filled up and one therefore
attempts to invent something, guided by a series of formal rules derived from one's experience of reading
poetry, which both make possible invention and impose limits on it.
Structuralism is oriented toward the reader insofar as it says that the reader constructs literature,
that is, reads the text with certain conventions and expectations in mind. Some post-structural theorists,
Fish for instance, hold that the reader constructs the text entirely, through the conventions of reading of her
interpretive community.
In joining with formalism in the identification of literariness as the focus on the message itself as
opposed to a focus on the addressee, the addresser, or the referential function of the message,
structuralism places ambiguity, as Genette points out, at the heart of the poetic function, as its selfreferential nature puts the message, the addresser and the addressee all in doubt. Hence literary textuality
is complexly meaningful.
Structuralism underlines the importance of genre, i.e., basic rules as to how subjects are
approached, about conventions of reading for theme, level of seriousness, significance of language use,
and so forth. "Different genres lead to different expectations of types of situations and actions, and of
psychological, moral, and esthetic values." (Genette)
The idea that literature is an institution is another structuralist contribution; that a number of its
protocols for creation and for reading are in fact controlled by that institutional nature.
Through structuralism, literature is seen as a whole: it functions as a system of meaning and
reference no matter how many works there are, two or two thousand. Thus any work becomes the parole,
the individual articulation, of a cultural langue, or system of signification. As literature is a system, no work
of literature is an autonomous whole; similarly, literature itself is not autonomous but is part of the larger
structures of signification of the culture.
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The following are some points based on Culler's ideas about the advantages of structuralism,
having to do with the idea that literature is a protocol of reading:
Structuralism is a firmer starting-point for reading literature as literature than are other approaches,
because literariness and/or fictionality does not have to be shown to be inherent in the text, but in the way it
is read. It explains, for instance, why the same sentence can have a different meaning depending on the
genre in which it appears, it explains how the boundaries of the literary can change from age to age, it
accommodates and explains differing readings of a text given differing reading protocols -- one can read a
text for its 'literary' qualities or for its sociological or ideological qualities, for instance, and read as complex
a text in doing so.
One gains an appreciation of literature as an institution, as a coherent and related set of codes and
practices, and so one sees also that reading is situated reading, that is, it is in a certain meaning-domain or
set of codes. It follows that when literature is written, it will be written under these codes (it can break or
alter the codes to create effects, but this is still a function of the codes).
Consequently one can be more open to challenges to and alterations of literary conventions.
Once one sees that reading and writing are both coded and based on conventions one can read
'against the grain' in a disciplined way, and one can read readings of literature -- reading can become a
more self-reflexive process.
 Structural Analysis
Barthes division of incidents into nuclei and catalyzers, and his promulgation of five codes of narrative:
proairetic -- things (events) in their sequence; recognizable actions and their effects.
semic -- the field where signifiers point to other signifiers to produce a chain of recognizable
connotations. In a general sense, that which enables meaning to happen.
hermeneutic -- the code of narrative suspense, including the ways in which the story suspends
closure, structures parallels, repetitions and so forth toward closure.
symbolic -- marks out meaning as difference; the binaries which the culture uses/enacts to create
its meanings; binaries which, of course,but disunite and join.
reference -- refers to various bodies of knowledge which constitute the society; creates the
familiarity of reality by quoting from a large assortment of social texts which mediate and organize
cultural knowledge of reality -- medicine, law, morality, psychology, philosophy, religion, plus all the
clichs and proverbs of popular culture.
diegetic -- the narration, the text's encoding of narrative conventions that signify how it means as a
telling.
The study of the construction of meaning in texts, as for instance through tropes, through
repetitions with difference. Hayden White analyzes the structure of Western historical narrative through a
theory of tropes; Lodge shows how metaphor and metonymy can be seen to form the bases respectively of
symbolic and realist texts.
The study of mimesis, that is, of the representation of reality, becomes i) the study of naturalization,
of the way in which reality effects are created and the way in which we create a sense of reality and
meaning from texts; ii) the study of conventions of meaning in texts.
Texts are also analyzed for their structures of opposition, particularly binary oppositions, as
informing structures and as representing the central concerns and imaginative structures of the society.
Texts can be analyzed as they represent the codes and conventions of the culture -- we can read
the texts as ways of understanding the meaning-structures of the cultures and sub-cultures out of which
they are written and which they represent.
(Some of the points for this introduction are taken from http://www.brocku.ca/english/courses/4F70/struct.html
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