Sunday, 29 March 2015

What is strcturalism? How is it aplied to the study of literature?


                                        Name :- Dave Mayuri P. 
                              M.A. Sem- 2   
 
                               Roll No - 13.
 
Paper no- 8 Indian writing english

Topic name: - what is structuralism? How is it applied to the study of literature?
         Submitted by: -Department of English.( M. K. B.U.)    
   
   
           What is structuralism? How is it applied to the study of literature?    
            
  Structuralism (structuralist criticism): it is the offshoot of certain developments in linguistics and anthropology. Saussure’s mode of the synchronic study of language was an attempt to formulate the grammar of a language from a study of parole. Using the Saussurian linguistic model, Claude Levi-Strauss examined the customs and conventions of some cultures with a view of arriving at the grammar of those cultures. Structuralist criticism aims of forming a poetics or the science of literature from a study of literary works. It takes for granted ‘the death of the author’; hence it looks upon works as self – organized linguistic structures. The best works in structuralist poetics has been done in the field of narrative.  
  
                    In literary theory, structuralism is an approach to analyzing the narrative material by examining the underlying invariant structure. For examples, a literary critic applying a structuralist literary  theory might say that the author of West side story did not write anything “really” new, because their works has the structure as Shakespeare’s ‘Romeo and Jolliet’. In both text a girl and a boy fall in love a ‘formula’ with a symbolic operator between them would be “Boys + Girls” despite the fact that they belong to two groups that hate each other. “Boy’s Group – Girls Group” or “opposing force” and conflict is resolved by resolved by their death.  
 
                           The versatility of structuralism is such that literary critic could make the same claim about a story of two friendly families boys family and girls family that arrange a marriage the justification is that the second story’s structure is an ‘inversion’ of the first story’s structure: between the values of love and the two pairs of parties involved have been reversed.  
  
                        Structuralist literary criticism argues that the “novelty value of a literary text” can lie only in new structure, rather than in the specifics of character development and voice in which that structured is expressed. 
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                Gerard Genette and structuralist criticism:-  
  Gerard genette  writes at the outset in his essay ‘structuralism and literary criticism’ that methods developed for the study of one discipline could be satisfactory applied to the study of other discipline as well. This is what he calls “intellectual bricolage”, borrowing a structuralism is the name given to Saussure’s approach to language as a system of relationship. But it is applied also to the study of philosophy, literature and other sciences of humanity. 
   
                 Structuralism as a method is peculiarly Imitable to literary criticism which is a discourse upon a discourse. Literary criticism in that it is meta-linguistic in character and comes into being/ existence as met literature. In his words: “it can be meta literature, that is to say, ‘a literature of which literature is the imposed object’.” That is, it is literature written to explain literature and language used in it to explain the role of language in literature.   
 
              In Genette’s words, ‘if writer questions the universe, the critic questions literature, that is to say, the universe of signs. But what was assign for the writer becomes meaning for the critic (since it is the object of the world) becomes a sign for the critic, as the theme and symbol of a certain literary nature’. Now this being so, there is certain room for reader’s interpretation. Levi-Strauss is quite right when he says that the critic always puts something of himself into the works he read. 
 
     The structuralist method of Criticism:-    
                             Literature, being primarily a work of language, and structuralism in its part, being prominently a linguistic method, the most probable encounter should obviously take place on the terrain of linguistics material. Sound, forms, words and sentences constitute the common object of the linguist of the linguist and the philologist to much an extent that it was possible, in the early Russian formalist movement, to define literature as a mere dialect, and to envisage its study as an annex of general dialectology.
  
                           Traditional criticism regard criticism as a message without code; Russian formalism regards literature as code without message. Structuralism by structural analysis makes it possible to uncover the connection that exists between a system of forms and for over all homologies (likeness, similarity).”
  
                   Meaning is yielded by the structural relationship within a given work. It is not introduced from outside. Genette believed that the structural study of ‘poetic language’ and of the forms of the literary expression cannot reject the analysis of the relations between code and message. The ambition of structuralism is not confined to counting feet and to observe the repetition of phonemes: it must also study sematic word meaning phenomena which constitute the essence of poetic language. It is in this reference that Genette writes: “one of that newest and most fruitful directions that are now opening up for literary research ought to be the structural study of the ‘large unities’ of discourse, beyond the framework – which linguistics in the strict sense cannot caross- of the sentence.” One would thus study systems from of literary expression. There would be linguistics of discourse that was translinguistics.   
 
                              Genette empathetically defines structuralism as a method is based on the study of structure wherever they occur. He further adds, “but to begin with, structures are not directly encountered objects- far from it; they are systems of latent relations, conceived rather than perceived, which analysis contracts as it uncovers them, and which it runs the risk of investing while believing that it is discovering them”. Furthermore, structuralism is not a method; it is also what Ernst Cassirer a ‘general tendency of thought’ or as others would say more crudely an ideology, the prejudice of which is precisely to value structures at the expense of substances.  



                            Genette is of the view that analysis that confines itself to a work without considering its sources or motives would be implicitly structuralist, and the structural method ought to intervene in order to give this immanent study a sort of rationality of understanding that would replace the rationality of explanation abandoned with the search of causes. Unlike Russian formalist, structuralist like Genette gave importance to thematic study also. “Thematic analysis”, writes Genette , “would tend spontaneously to culminate and to be tested in a structural synthesis in which the different themes are grouped in networks, in order to extract their full meaning from their place and function in the system of the works.” Thus, structuralism would appear to be a refuge for all immanent criticism against the danger of fragmentation that threatens thematic analysis.
   
              Genette believes that structural criticism is untainted by any of the transcendent reductions of psychoanalysis or Marxist explanation. He further writes, “It exerts, in its own way, a sort of internal reeducation, traversing the substance of the work in order to reach its bone-structure: certainly not a superficial examination, but a sort of radioscopic penetration, and all the more external in that is more penetrating.” 
  
                Thus to conclude we many say, the structuralist idea is to follow literature in its overall evolution, while making synchronic cuts at various stages and comparing the tables one with another. Literary evolution then appears in all its richness, which derives from the fact that the system survives while constantly altering. In this sense literary history becomes the history of a system: it is the evolution of the functions that is significant , not that of the elements, and knowledge of the synchronic relations necessarily precedes that of the processes.    
     
                        
                        
   


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