The Literary Criticism Web

Structuralism, like Formalism, views the literary text as encoded with meaning that emerges from the interplay of the linguistic facts of the text. Hence, the structuralist approach also entails a close attention to textual details as internal evidence of the emergent meaning of the whole. However, in contrast to a New Critic, the structuralist does not perceive the text as autotelic. Rather the code through which meaning is articulated is an extra-textual cultural construct.

Structuralist criticism emerged in France and was influenced by the early twentieth-century language model of Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. It gained acceptance in the United States beginning in the late 1950's and through the 1960's as Saussure's linguistic concepts were supplemented by the broader cultural and mythic concerns of Claude Levi-Strauss's Structural Anthropology, first available in America in 1963. Seminal structuralist studies of literature include Roland Barthe's Elements of Semiology (1967) and S/Z (1970), and Jonathan Culler's Structuralist Poetics (1975), and Robert Scholes's Semiotics and Interpretation (1982).

Most structuralist critics explore how literature is inevitably embedded in a larger cultural discourse structured by a shared set of conventions. These conventions may involve expectations concerning plot, characterization, style, genre or metaphor. For understanding to occur, the reader must consciously or unconsciously respond to and apply the conventions of a code appropriate for the text. This ability to decode the conventions of a given discourse delineates literary competence. If the reader does not bring to the text an understanding of its conventions, misreading may occur at best and confusion at worst. For meaning to be experienced, then, the reader and the text (and perhaps by extrapolation the author) must share the same literary code(s). (See Jonathan Culler's discussion of Saussaure's concepts of la langue and la parole in "Structuralism and Literature.")

This structuralist delineation of the reading process has profound implications for the study of literature. First of all, it stresses that literature is an artificial selection of language whose meaning is immediately clear to readers understanding the conventions of the text. As a result, the proper focus of criticism is not upon the discovery of meaning, not upon interpreting what a work means. Rather the proper focus of criticism is upon how the work means . . . how its meaning is encoded in a set of conventions and what linguistic operations are required of the reader to decode those conventions.

For the reader uninitiated to the structure of the Renaissance sonnet -- its conventions of versification, diction, logical sequence, and imagery -- a particular Shakespeare sonnet may seem a maze of language. For this novice reader, pursuing meaning by an explication of just the parts of the poem itself will lead to only limited understanding that will not access the richness of its language apparent to a more competent reader who can place the sonnet in the larger discourse of Renaissance poetry. However, for the structuralist critic the responses of both the initiated and uninitiated reader would illustrate the central process of meaningful reading: the naturalization of the text by the reader to transform it into vraisemblance -- something that makes sense, seems true, seems real. (For more discussion of the structuralist focus on the reading process, see the critical summary of Jonathan Culler's "Structuralism and Literature.")

The structuralist critic uses semiotics to trace this process of naturalization. In semiotic terms, the linguistic code employed in a given piece of literature is a sign-system. In exploring how meaning is articulated in literature, the structuralist describes and assesses the sign-system used and reflected in a given work. As delineated by Ferdinand de Saussure, a sign is a linguistic experience made up of two parts: a signifier and a signified. The signifier is a sound-image (a word) that is associated with a concept (the signified). This pairing is a convention of a given sign-system. The same signifier can point to a different signified in the context of different sign-systems. (For instance, in the system of traffic signs the color "green" has a different signification than it does when observed on refrigerated meat!) Within a given sign-system, the meaning of a sign -- the signified pointed to by a signifier -- is routinely delineated by the context of the other signs of the system. A signifier thus is linear. That is, it is embedded in a series of other signifiers, and its signification is indicated by the signs that precede and follow. (For more on the basic concepts of semiotics, see the critical summary of Saussure's "Nature of the Linguistic Sign.")

In addition, within a sign-system, signs form pairs expressive of polar values of the system. These key pairs of signs are termed binary oppositions (BO's). A structuralist analysis of literature often amounts to an identification of BO's and to an evaluation of which sign in a BO is privileged by the system as "better" or more valuable. By identifying the pattern(s) of BO's in a piece of literature, the structuralist critic analyzes and evaluates the conventions through which its meaning is experienced. This understanding derived from Structuralism, then, is not so much an awareness of the particular message or theme of a poem or story as it is an appreciation of the ingrained values or attitudes or biases of its language system.

updated 07/30/99