Structuralism By John Lye 1996

General principles 1.Meaning occurs through difference 2.Relations among signs are of two sorts, contiguity and substitutability 3.Structuralism notes that much of our imaginative world is structured of, and structured by, binary oppositions 4.Structuralism forms the basis for semiotics, the study of signs, a sign is a union of signifier and signified

5. Central too to semiotics is the idea of codes, which give signs context—cultural codes, literary codes, etc. 6. Some signs carry with them larger cultural meanings, usually very general; these are called, by Roland Barthes, “myths”, or second – order signifiers.

7. Structuralism introduces the ideas of the ‘subject’, as opposed to the idea of the individual as a stable indivisible ego. 8. 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 repressions of the culture. Both the self and the unconcious are cultural constructs.

9. 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. 10. There is, then, in structuralism, a coherent connection among the conceptions of reality, the social, the individual, the unconscious; they are all of the same signs, codes and conventions, all working according to similar laws

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 textual and in its cultural meaningfulness.

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.

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.

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.

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 a 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.

Some possible approaches The study of the basic codes which make narrative possible, and which make it work. –Proairetic—things (events) in their sequence; recognizable actions and their effects. –Semic– the field where signifier 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

-The study of the construction of meaning in texts, as for instance through tropes, through repetitions with difference.

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 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.