Structuralism 杨品娜 What is Structuralism?

Jackbson:

• Structuralists, in fact, tend not to be too concerned about content, but with the processes that create meaning .

Lévi -Strauss

• What were the laws and patterns that were operating behind the scenes to make the literary work happen?

The Structural Study of Myth (Levi-Strauss)

• method:
• breaking down its story into the shortest possible sentences
• writng each sentence on an index card bearing a number correpsonding to the unfolding of the story
• each card(gross constituent unit) then will show that a certain function is linked to (a relation) a given subject

Key Term

• Mythemes - a term developed by Lévi-Strauss--mythemes are the smallest component parts of a myth.
• By breaking up myths into mythemes, those structures (mythemes) may be studied chronologically (~ diacrhonically) or synchronically/relationally.

Application in Oedipus myth

• column 1:overratng of blood relations
• column 2: underrating of blood relations
• column 3:denial of the autochthonous origin of man
• column 4:the persistence of the autochthonous origins of mankind
• orignal problem:born from one or born from two

The Strucural Activity(Roland Barthes)

• “structural man takes the real, decomposes it, then recomposes it”
• What emerges from such a reconfiguration of constituent features is a virtual object (simulacrum)recomposing the “real” one(s)
• “the goal of all structuralist activity is to reconstruct an “object” in such way as to manifest thereby the rules of funcitoning of the object(visual object)”

Structuralist narratology

• A form of structuralism espoused by Vladimir Propp, Tzvetan Todorov, Roland Barthes, and Gerard Genette that illustrates how a story's meaning develops from its overall structure (its langue) rather than from each individual story's isolated theme.
• To ascertain a text's meaning, narratologists emphasize grammatical elements such as verb tenses and the relationships and configurations of figures of speech within the story"

Review: key terms

• signs/ signifer/ signified
• binary opposition
• sychronical study/diachronical study
• parole/langue
• Mythemes
• gross constituent unit
• simulacrum

Influence

• Came from France to US in early 1960s
• Only floourished for couple of years until Derrida in1966
• Inspired trends in literary theory from Marxism to Psychoanalysis, Feminism, Race/Ethncity to Semiotics

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