STRUCTURALISM AND SEMIOTICS

233

…opposite of the rhetorical analysis of literature…

…they seek to know, as Roland Barthes notes in “The Structuralist Activity” (1963), “how meaning is possible.”

…structuralism and semiotics grow out of the great advances in twentieth-century linguistics initiated by Ferdinand de Saussure.

…also…out of the literary movement of Russian Formalism…

…Shklovsky… scientific method for understanding social meanings in general and literary meaning in particular.

…Marin…analyze systematically “the codes by which people make reality significant, by which they interpret reality…signs,  symbols, and values which recreate, as significant for them, the real conditions of their existence.”

Structural Linguistics, Structuralism, and Semiotics

……replace the “diachronic” study of language through time, the study of the development of language, with the “synchronic” study of the particular formation of language at a particular moment.

…Saussure…language as well—is “a form, not a substance.”

234

… “structural” linguistics suggests that the nature of linguistic elements is relational…

… “it is the viewpoint that creates the object” of linguistic science.

…assumes the arbitrary nature of the linguistic sign.  Since the  relationships rather than the “elements” of a system of language are crucial, all the elements of language could be different from what they are.

…language takes whatever material is at hand to create its meanings…

Formal relationships are simultaneous rather than sequential…

…meaning is more readily apprehended and analyzed through visual models rather than narrative discourse.  (Both Kristeva an Marin in this section make this clear).

… double nature of language…

…signified and a signifier…

…both in speech (parole) and in the system (the order or structure of its code), language as a system (la langue).

… “the absolutely final law of language is, we dare say, that there is nothing which can ever reside in one term, as a direct consequence of the fact that linguistic symbols are unrelated to what they should designate.”

…Saussure… calls “semiology.”…Peirce… called “semiotics.”

… “the codes by which people make reality significant” that Marin describes in his semiotic analysis of Disneyland.

Shklovsky… isolate the formal “devices” that create the effects he finds in literature..

…even Northrop Frye calls for a kind of systematic and scientific study…

235

…the semiotic or structural study of myth and culture—has been the lifework of the foremost practitioner of structuralism in western Europe, the French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss.

…the way linguistics analyzes sentences, structural anthropology—as he calls it—can analyze communal narrative discourse.

…highest scientific ambition of structuralism and semiotics.

…French structuralism of the 1960s and early 1970s has proved to be a watershed in modern criticism, causing a major reorientation in literary studies.

…the supposed detachment of such an investigation appeared to be offensively antihumanistic…

…Kroeber… “structure” is a redundant concept that needs no articulation…

…transformed, almost immediately in the United States, into simply a step or stage in a host of critical and cultural programs that can be called “post-structural.”

236

Julia Kristeva… semiotics requires the “and/or” of a science that also creates the possibility of a critique of science.

…modern criticism has become an interdisciplinary phenomenon.

Literary Structuralism

Literature, as Kristeva argues, has a special relationship to semiotics both as a privileged field in which to examine the semiotic functioning of meaning and as a particular “object” of semiotic study.

Russian Formalism is a good example of the aims of and methods of structural linguistics applied to literary studies, while French structuralism offers examples of wider semiotic practices focused on literature.

Russian Formalism

…literary formalism…represented by both American New Criticism…and Russian Formalism.

…displace “content” in literary analysis and to focus, instead, on literary “form” in a detailed manner analogous to the methods of empirical scientific research.

…organize the generic structures of literature into a system consistent with the inner ordering of works…

…levels of generality—from the specific components of a poetic image or line through the poem’s genre to that genre’s place in the system of literature.

237

…not as constituted by its intrinsic (“natural”) meaning, as an imitation of reality, but by relational patterns that are meaningful in a particular work and genre.

…Moscow Linguistic Circle, begun in 1915, and OPOYAZ (Society for the Study of Poetic Language), started in 1916.

…Prague Linguistic Circle (founded in 1926), of which Roman Jakobson…

…Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale (1928).

…avoid all romantic notions about poetic inspiration, genius, or aesthetic organicism.

…deliberately mechanistic view of poetry and other literary art as the products of craft.

…no particular deployment of words, images, or other language effects is intrinsically literary.

…literature, like other usages of language, could have a particular function, could “work” to accomplish particular ends…

…Kenneth Burke…more linguistic rather than “sociological”…

…language deployed as language…

…as the object of criticism.  Linguistic properties then become the primary concern—instead of “inspiration”…

…identifying formal properties as effective…

…Shklovsky [Russian Formalism]… literary “device” aimed at effecting some end…

…Saussure’s “functional” definition of linguistic entities.

…concentration on images…leads one to view a poem as having actual “content”…

… “content” needs to be considered as “device”…

238

…language is a medium of communication before it is used in art…

…overly familiar to the reader…

To be made new and poetically useful, such language must be “defamiliarized” and “made strange” through linguistic displacement…

Rhyme schemes (or lack of rhyme), chiasmus (rhetorical balance and reversal), catachresis (the straining of a word or figure beyond its usual meaning), conceits, mixed metaphors, and so on—all these devices  for producing particular effects…

…intricacy and texture of verbal structure.

…quite different from romantic criticism’s view…for transcendent (or divine) feelings or poetic (or personal) genius.

French Structuralism

… “account for” literature and other cultural objects as fully and objectively as possible, without recourse to such “mysterious” and unanalyzable concepts as “genius” or “inexhaustible richness” or “poetic language” inassimilable into general linguistics and semiotics.

…signs and codes and the conditions that allow that system to function, including relevant cultural frames.

Marin…Disneyland “as a text”…

…thousands of narratives uttered by the visitors” and analyzed “according to the codes (vocabulary and syntax) imposed by the makers of Disneyland.”

The power of structuralism derived, as Barthes said in any early essay, from its being “essentially an activity” that could “reconstruct an ‘object’ in such a way as to manifest thereby the rules of functioning.”

…Kristeva… semiotics as the “development of models, that is, of formal systems whose structure is isomorphic or analogous to the structure of another system.”

…Barthes… “intelligible” imitation of a literary object… focused on the synchronic dimension of a literary text (langue as opposed to parole), the specific ways in which a text is like other texts.

…literature is conceived as putting “ ‘meaning’ in the world, but not ‘a meaning.’ “ for this reason the structural comparison of texts is based on similarities of function (character development, plot, theme, ideology, and so on), relationships that Levi-Strauss called homologies.

239

…synchronic analysis of homologies “recreates” the text as a “paradigm”

…structuralism, in its scientific project, tends to focus on the fixity of relations within synchronic paradigms at the expense of temporality, or the “diachronic” dimension, which involves history.

…tendency to avoid dealing with time and social change concerned many critics of structuralism from its beginning and ultimately became a main target of deconstruction’s critique of the prior movement.

Jakobson is perhaps the most rigorous critic to use linguistic analyses…to analyze poems and narratives.

…structural analysis of the “system” of literature…

…genre theory…

…structuralism has more broadly attempted to analyze the structures (or grammar) of narrative.

…Levi-Strauss…diachronic dimension (the story line) is eclipsed in favor of a synchronic “reading” of “mythemes” (recurrent narrative structures) in several versions of the Oedipus story.

The Critique of Structuralism

Derrida connects structuralism with a traditional Western blindness to the “structurality of structure, or an unwillingness to examine the theoretical and ideological implications of “structure” as a concept.

…as if one could move outside of cultural understanding to take a detached view of culture.

…privileging of the opposition between “nature” and “culture”—what in The Raw and the Cooked Levi-Strauss calls the tangible and intelligible.

Derrida …there is no standing free of structure, no so-called “natural” state free of the structural interplay that, in the structuralist analysis, constitutes meaning.  There is no objective examination of structure.

Derrida…recognize the interplay of differences among texts, the activity that he and others call structuration.

Kristeva… Semiotics, she argues, is not only a “science.”  It also is a critique of science…

…assumption that the objects of science and the elements of scientific method can be simple and “pure”…

…natural and the human sciences also considers the former to be more ‘pure’ than the latter.”

…Kristeva… “semiotic research” always “ultimately uncovers its own ideological gesture.

… begins with a certain knowledge as its goal, and ends up discovering a theory…

…itself a signifying system…

… complex nature of semiotic study…

…both how meaning is conditioned and how it is communicated—the double project of … “articulation” and “communication”…

…overwhelmingly cultural nature of language and discourse…

…always exists within a context of more than one person, more than one meaning.

241

…language both communicates their thoughts and articulates and structures what can be thought.  For this reason, as Kristeva says, semiotics always turns and returns to “ideology” and the cultural formations in which it works.

Kristeva offers a structural/semiotic analysis that is both informed by structuralism and has a tendency toward poststructuralism, by the scientific method of semiotics and the deconstructive extension of that method.