Structuralism

Structuralism and some of it's Prominent Figurs

structuralism is a theory that uses culturally interconnected signs to reconstruct systems of relationships rather than studying isolated, material things in themselves. This method found wide use from the early 20th cent. in a variety of fields, especially linguistics, particularly as formulated by Ferdinand de Saussure. Anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss used structuralism to study the kinship systems of different societies. No single element in such a system has meaning except as an integral part of a set of structural connections. These interconnections are said to be binary in nature and are viewed as the permanent, organizational categories of experience. Structuralism has been influential in literary criticism and history, as with the work of Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault. In France after 1968 this search for the deep structure of the mind was criticized by such "poststructuralists" as Jacques Derrida, who abandoned the goal of reconstructing reality scientifically in favor of "deconstructing" the illusions of metaphysics.



Structuralism is more than a Linguistic Exercise

There is a homology, a structural relationship, between the way language cuts up the world of meaning, and the way literature and literary genres do. There is an analogy between literature and linguistics not only because they are both involved in language but because both deal with:
1.the relation between forms and meanings,
2.the way reality is culturally defined by the segmentation and identification of experience,
3.the cultural perception of reality, and
4.the systemic relationships of signs which underlie those cultural perceptions.