Structuralism and semiotics

Guatemala June, 17 Structuralism and semiotics

Structuralism is an intellectual movement that began in France in the 1950s. Its essence is the belief that things cannot be understood in isolation - they have to be seen in the context of the larger structures they are part of.

Anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss’s work in 1908

Literary critic Roland Barthes (1915-1980)

The arrival of the Structuralism approach to Literature

It caused a great deal of controversy, precisely because literary studies in these countries had traditionally had very little interest in large abstract issues of the kind structuralists wanted to raise. The so-called 'Cambridge revolution' in English studies in the 1920s had promulgated the opposite to wider questions, abstract issues, and ideas.

Signs of the fathers - Saussure

Saussure: meaning we give to words is arbitrary, maintained by convention. Is no inherent connection between a word and what it designates.

Structuralism: language isn't a reflection of the world and of experience, but a system that stands quite separate from it.

Scope of Structuralism

In Saussure’s model language was transferable and would explain the functioning of all systems of signification as well. Claude Levi-Strauss applied the structuralist perspective to the interpretation of myth. With this method, the story and the cycle of which it is a part are reconstituted in terms of opposition.

The broader structure can also be found, in the entire corpus of an author’s work.

Sin culture is made up of many structural networks that carry meaning and can be shown to function in a systematic way.

This network functions through codes as a system of signs. These codes can be read or decoded by the structuralist or semiotician

These elements have their place in an overall structure, and the structure if of greater importance than the individual element.