Structuralism for beginners

Structuralism is an intellectual movement given to a wide range of discourses that study underlying structures of language.Structuralism concerns with the process of obtaining meaning. How we get meaning is more important than what the meaning is. In Europe it was largely based on the principles laid down by Ferdinand de Saussure, and in America it was associated with the approach known as Bloomfieldean.

The term 'Structuralism' stands for a school of thought that developed in the 1960s in France in the wake of Claude Levi Strauss (French anthropologist), he attempted to discover the objective meaning of human culture. Its essence is the belief that things can’t be understood in isolation. Therefore as a school of thought structuralism cannot be reduced to a single movement or trend. rather it had strong impact on many disciplines during the entire twentieth century.

The foundational principles of structuralism were based on the lecture notes of the great Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure entitled Course in general linguistics. The general methodological principles of Saussure are as follows.

Structural linguistics

Structural linguistics was developed by Ferdinand de Saussure between 1913 and 1915. It looks for the rules and the fundamentals of language and govern how it functions: it looks for the structure.

In order to differentiate between the structure that governs language and the millions of individual utterances that are its surface phenomena, Saussure called the structure of language langue (the French word for language), and he called the individual utterances that occur when we speak parole (the French word for speech).

While making distinctions between the linguistic system and its actual manifestations, we arrive at the crucial opposition between langue and parole.

Langue is the system or structure of a language whereas parole is the activity of speaking in a language or actual speech. According to Saussure, within the whole field of linguistic activity (language), we should distinguish between the language system (langue) and speaking or writing the language parole).

Langue - as language structure which consists of vocabulary, principles of construction, idioms, rules of pronunciation, etc.

parole-as language, both speech or writing used in context.

The components of a structure are not merely a collection of independent items: they form a working unit because they exist in relation to one another. They interact and we are able to perceive those components, as Saussure noted in terms of the structure of language, only because we perceive their difference from one another. Difference simply means that our ability to identify an entity (such as an object, a concept, or a sound) is based on the difference we perceive between it and all other entities. For example, if we believed that all objects were the same color, we wouldn’t need the word red (or blue or green) at all. Red is red only because we perceive it to be different from blue and green. According to structuralism, the human mind perceives difference most readily in terms of opposites, which structuralists call binary oppositions: two ideas, directly opposed, each of which we understand by means of its opposition to the other. For example, we understand up as the opposite of down, female as the opposite of male, good as the opposite of evil, black as the opposite of white, and so on.

Saussure argued that words do not simply refer to objects in the world for which they stand. Instead, a word is a linguistic sign consisting, like the two sides of a coin, of two inseparable parts: signifier + signified. A signifier is a “sound-image” (a mental imprint of a linguistic sound); the signified is the concept to which the signifier refers. Thus, a word is not merely a sound-image (signifier), nor is it merely a concept (signified). A sound-image becomes a word only when it is linked with a concept. Furthermore, the relationship between signifier and signified, Saussure observed, is arbitrary: there is no necessary connection between a given sound-image and the concept to which it refers. There is no reason why the concept of a tree should be represented by the sound-image “tree”. The relationship between signifier and signified is merely a matter of social convention: it’s whatever the community using it says it is.

Structuralism is not an interpretative theory; it looks for the grammar of literature and its poetics (the art of writing). The individual things can be understood in the context of larger structures only. Thus literature is considered as a part of culture.

Structuralism can be regarded as a developed version of Formalism, the former connects a particular work with the works of similar structures, as it examines all kinds of underlying structures. While the latter, is primarily an intrinsic approach to a work of art and interprets a text by focusing on its inherent features by rejecting all the extraneous influences.

As a literary theory Structuralism relates a literary text to a larger structure, it looks for inter-textual connection, similar patterns and generic conventions. Saussure emphasized the facts that meanings of words are relational. To apply structuralism means to relate everything in order to generate a complete meaning.