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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