Structuralism

The Beginning of Structuralism

1. ¨ In the West, the influx of structuralism was to some extent anticipated in the work of Canadian Northrop Frye, who was the most influential theorist in America of what is called Myth Criticism (from 1940s-the mid of 1960s).
2. ¨ The Practitioners are Northrop Frye, Richard Chase, Leslie Fiedler, Daniel Hoffman, and Philip Wheelwright
3. ¨ They viewed the creation of Myth as integral to human thought , and believe that literature emerges out of a core of myth, where Myth is understood as collective attempt on the part of various cultures and group to establish a meaningful context of human existence

Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism (1957)

• ¨ Criticism should be scientific, objective and systematic discipline
• ¨ Literary criticism views literature itself as a system
• ¨ Literature being views as a timeless, static and autonomous construct

1960s

• ¨ Structuralism imported into America from France
• ¨ It’s leading exponents included Roman Jakobson, Jonathan Culler, Michael Riffaterre, Claudio Guillen, Gerald Prince, and Robert Scholas.
• ¨ Other American thinkers working in the field of semiotics have included C.S. Peirce, Charles Morris and Noam Chomsky
• ¨ Structuralism diverged sharply  from romantic notion of the author as the sources of meaning, and shift emphasis away from authorial intention toward the broader and impersonal linguistic structure in which the author’s text participated, and indeed enable the text
• ¨ Jonathan Culler, in his renowned study structuralist poetics (1975) explained that structuralist investigations of literature would seek to identify  the system of conventions underlying literature.
• ¨ Robert Scholas in Structuralism in Literature: An Introduction (1974) sought a scientific basis for the study of literature as an interconnected system of various texts.
• ¨ Roman Jakobson, who worked out an influential model of communication as well as a distinction between metaphor and metonymy in the analysis of narratives.

Ferdinand De Saussure (1987-1913)

• ¨ The founder of modern linguistics and structuralism.
• ¨ Much poststructuralism arose in partial reaction against his thought, it nonetheless presupposed his theoretical advance in linguistics.
• ¨ He was born into a Swiss family
• ¨ He taught in Paris and later at the University of Geneva
• ¨ A wide range of subjects including Gothic, Old German, Latin, and Persian.
• ¨ His lectures in General Linguistics, posthumously compiled by his colleagues as Course in General Linguistics  (1916)
• ¨ Saussure undertook a synchronic approach which saw language as a structure that could be studied in its entirety at a given point in time.

Saussure pioneered a number of further influential and radical insight

• ¨ He denied that there is somehow a natural connection between words and things, urging that this connection is conventional.
• ¨ He argued that language is a system of sign in relation
• ¨ He made a distinction between 2 dimensions of language: langue and parole
• ¨ Langue, which refers to language as a structured system, grounded on certain rules.
• ¨ Parole, the specific act of speech or utterance which are based on those rules.
• ¨ In his Course in General Linguistics, Saussure explained that it is langue, not the act of speech , which must be the object of scientific investigation.

Saussure points out other differences between language and speech.

1.      Speech is homogenous, language is heterogeneous.

2.      Language is no less concrete than speech: language is constituted by linguistic signs which are collectively approved, and these sign “are realities that have their seat in the brain”

3.      Unlike speech, language can be classified among human phenomena: it is a social institution, with unique features that distinguish it from other, political and legal, institutions.

4.      Saussure’s exposition in his course of the “Nature of the Linguistic Sign” is worth considering in some detail since it provides a reference point for much subsequent literary and cultural theory.

5.      Especially important is his use of terms “sign”, “signifier”, and “signified”.

6.      He attacks the conventional correspondence theory of meaning whereby language is viewed as a naming process, each word corresponding to the thing it names.

7.      As against this view, Saussure urges that both terms of the linguistic sign (signifier and signified) are psychological in nature; the sign unites not a thing with a name but a concept with a sound-image.

8.      The latter is not the material sound but the “psychological imprint of the sound,” the impression it makes on our senses; hence it too is psychological.

9.      He suggests a new terminology: signified designates  the concept, and signifier designates the sound image, and sign designates the combination of these or the entire construct.

10. Signifier (the word or sound image “table”)

          Signified (the concept of “table”)

          sign > actual object: table

The sign has two primordial characteristics

¨ The bond between signifier and signified is arbitrary: by this, Saussure means that the concept is not linked by any inner relationship to the succession of sounds which serves as its signifier.

¨ The bond is not natural but unmotivated, based on collective behavior or convention, fixed by rules. Signifiers and gestures do not have any intrinsic value. Saussure is careful to suggest that “arbitrary” does not imply that the choice of the signifier is left entirely to the speaker: the individual has no power to change a sign in any way once it has become established in the linguistic community.

Roland Barthes (1915-1980)

• ¨ Roland Barthes’ theoretical development is often seen as embodying a transition from structuralist to poststructuralist perspectives, though certain of his works are characterized by a Marxian perspective.
• ¨ Barthes extended structural analysis and semiology  to board cultural phenomena
• ¨ He also confronted the limits of structuralism, pointing the way to freer and more relativistic assessments of text and their role in culture.
• ¨ Famous with the notion of the “death of the author” that appeared in 1968
• ¨ He anticipate many facets of poststructuralism, including certain elements of deconstruction, cultural studies and queer studies.
• ¨ Barthes was affiliated with certain mainstream French institutions, such as the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) and the College de France.
• ¨ His first works derived inspiration from Saussure, Sartre, and Marxist.
• ¨ Barthes’ multivalent analysis of Balzac’s novella Sarrasine in his S/Z (1970) marks the point of transition between structuralism and his later postructuralist disposition.
• ¨ These dispositions were elaborated in his essay “From Work to Text” (1971) and books such as The Pleasure of The Text (1973).
• ¨ In his book of Mythologies, Barthes undertook an ideological critique of various products of mass bourgeois culture, attempting to account for this mystification of culture or history into a universal nature.
• ¨ Myth is not an object, a concept, or an idea but a language, a type of speech. It is a mode of signification.
• ¨ Barthes reiterates Saussure’s view that semiology is comprised of three terms: the signifier (which is a mental image), the signified (a concept), and sign (consist of the combination of signifier and signified).
• ¨ The examples of mythical concepts might be democracy, freedom, and American imperiality , signifiers which are often wrenched from their actual history and made to signify concepts such as peace, world order, and security. Hence, Myth naturalize these concepts and this is fact is “the very principle of myth: it transforms history into nature.
• ¨ The function of myth (Barthes) is to “empty reality” and that “myth is depoliticized speech”. It means that the most natural object contains a political trace, however faint and diluted, the more or less memorable presence of the human act which has produced, fitted up, used, subjected or rejected it.
• ¨ Barthes saw bourgeois ideology as a process of myth-making, whereby the bourgeoisie, instead of identifying itself as a class, merges into the concept of “nation,” thereby presenting bourgeois values as being in the national interest. Through this depoliticizing and “universalistic effort” of its vocabulary, the bourgeoisie was able to postulate its own definitions of justice, truth, and law as universal; it was able to postulate its own definition of humanity as comprising “human nature”; and “bourgeois norms are experienced as the evident laws of a natural order”
• ¨ According to Barthes, myth can be opposed or undermined either by producing an artificial myth, highlighting its own mythical status, or by using speech in an explicitly political manner.
• ¨ In “The Death of the Author” (1968), he argues that as soon as narration occurs without any practical purpose, as an end in itself, “this disconnection occurs, the voice loses its origin, the author enters into his own death, writing begins.
• ¨ The modern, individual, author, says Barthes, was “a product of our society insofar as, emerging from the Middle Ages with English empiricism, French rationalism and the personal faith of the Reformation, it discovered the prestige of the individual . . . the epitome and culmination of capitalist ideology.” Even in the present, says Barthes, our studies of literature are “tyrannically centred on the author”.
• ¨ Recently, as Barthes observes, many writers have challenges this centrality of the author.
• ¨ This removal of the author, transform the modern text
• ¨ The modern scriptor is born simultaneously with text
• ¨ According to Barthes, we can no longer think of writing in the classical ways, as recording, representing, or depicting.
• ¨ Rather, it is a “performative” act, that is a text can no longer be viewed as releasing in a linear fashion a single “theological” meaning, as the message of the “Author-God.” Rather, it is “a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture”.
• ¨ A text’s unity, says Barthes, “lies not in its origin but in its destination,” in the reader. Yet Barthes cautions that the humanism we have rejected via removal of the author should not be reinstated through any conception of the reader as a personal and complete entity.
• ¨ The reader of which Barthes speaks is a reader “without history, biography, psychology; he is simply that someone who holds together in a single field all the traces by which the written text is constituted.” In other words, the reader, like the author, is a function of the text. In this sense “the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author”
• ¨ In a essay, “From Work to Text” (1971), Barthes provides a succinct statement of a poststructuralist perspective.
• ¨ He distinguishes between a “work” and a “text.” Whereas a “work” offers up to analysis a closed signified or definite meaning, a “text” can never allow investigation to halt at some signified, some concept which represents its ultimate meaning. Like language, the text “is structured but off-centred, without closure” .
• ¨ Barthes states an important feature of poststructuralist analysis when he says that the text is held in “intertextuality,” in a network of signifiers. And, whereas the work is consumed more or less passively, the text asks of the reader a “practical collaboration” in the production of the work. The implication here is that the text invites participation in its own play, its subversion of hierarchies, and its endless deferment of the definite.

Sumber:

A History of Literary Criticism and Theory, from Plato to the Present M.A.R. Habib Blackwell, 2007.  EAN: 9781405176088