Structuralism Flashcards
Form is inevitably bound up with
Meaning
Is what makes meaning possible
Structure
Governs ways of interpretations
An invisible and intangible structure (conventions)
Principal questions of structuralism
how does language work? How language shapes the way we think? (Lera Boroditsky)
2 divisions of language by Ferdinand de Saussure
1) Langue (The underlying system that governs language)
2) Parole: how language is employed for communicative purposes though the use of words and sentences.
First step of language (Saussure)
Language should be seen as a system of signs.
Second step of language (Saussure)
The system of signs are in first instance arbitrary.
Third step of language (Saussure)
The arbitrary forms become conventions.
Signifier
The word as it is spoken or written.
Signified
The meaning
Language
Is for all practical purposes an autonomous system that carves up the world for us and governs the way we see it.
Most important theorist in anthropological structuralism
Claude Levi - Strauss
What does anthropological structuralism says?
The most diverse myths, recorded in cultures that seemingly have no connections with each other can be seen as variations upon one and the same basic pattern. Narrotology.
Scriptable / writerly text (Barthles)
Écriture
Lisible / readerly text (Barthles)
Écrivance
Écriture
Literary (LIBROS, no literal lol) writing, inherently political
Écrivance
Writing which seek to be transparent and is thus complicit with the prevailing dominant ideology with its basis in positivistic science
The death of the author
The reader is not longer considered a consumer of the text, but a producer of it.
Denotation (Barthles)
Is a correlation immanent in the text.
Connotation (Barthles)
Are meanings which are neither in the dictionary nor in the grammar of the language In which the text is written.
Structuralism
Sees itself as a human science whose effort is to understand, in a systematic way, the fundamental structures that underlie all human experience and, therefore, all human behavior and production.
Two fundamental levels of how structuralism sees the world
Visible world (Surface phenomena) and invisible world (structuring principles)
Visible world (Surface phenomena)
All the countless objects, activities, and behaviors we observe, participate in, and interact with every day.
Invisible World (Structuring principles)
Consists of the structures that underlie and organize all of these phenomena so that we can make sense of them.
Where do structures come from?
Structuralists believe they are generated by the human mind, which is thought of as a structuring mechanism.
Three properties of stucture
Wholeness, transformation and self-regulation
Wholeness
Means that the system functions as a unit.
Transformation
Means that the system is not static; it’s dynamic, capable of change.
Self-Regulation
The elements engendered by transformations always belong to the system and obey its laws.
Structuralism assumes that all surface phenomena
Belong to some structural system, whether or not we are consciously aware of what that system is.
Diachronically
Language studied studied in terms of the history of changes in individual words over time
Sinchronically
To understand language but as a structural system of relationships among words as they are used at a given point in time. Structuralist focus
The structure of language (Saussure). Structural system shared by members of the society and is composed by rules, symbols and signs.
Langue
The individual utterances that occur when we speak (Saussure). Speech
Parole
Proper object of study of structuralism
Langue
Binary oppositions
Two ideas, directly opposed, each of which we understand by means of its opposition to the other.
Linguistic sign
Word
Parts of a sign
Signifier + Signified
Signifier
the word as it is spoken or written (the form)
Signified
The meaning (concept that is referred)
What does our language mediates?
Our experience of our world and ourselves: it determines what we see when we look around us and when we look at ourselves.
Structural Anthropology
Comparative study of human cultures. seeks the underlying common denominators, the structures, that link all human beings regardless of the differences among the surface phenomena of the cultures to which they belong.
Semiotics
The study of sign systems, especially as they apply to the analysis of popular culture.
Structural anthropologists would argue that the differences are only
only at the level of surface phenomena or, as structural linguists would put it, at the level of parole.
Mythemes
The enormous number of myths from various cultures reduces itself to a rather limited number; the fundamental units of myths.
Sign system
A linguistic or nonlinguistic object or behavior (or collection of objects or behaviors) that can be analyzed as if it were a specialized language.
Three recognized classes of sign
Index, Icon and symbol
Index
A sign in which the signifier has a concrete, causal relationship to the signified. (Humo del fuego)
Icon
Is a sign in which the signifier physically resembles the signified. (Fuego)
Symbol
Is a sign in which the relationship between signifier and signified is neither natural nor necessary but arbitrary, that is, decided on by the conventions of a community or by the agreement of some group. Palabra fuego
Semiotic codes
The underlying structural components that carry a nonverbal cultural message of some sort.
Structuralist criticism
deals mainly with narrative. Seeks the structure that allows texts to make meaning.
Structuralist approaches to literature
the classification of literary genres, the description of narrative operations, and the analysis of literary interpretation.
Theory of Myths (Frye) / Archetypal criticism
A theory of genres that seeks the structural principles underlying the Western literary tradition
Mythoi
is a term Frye uses to refer to the four narrative patterns that structure myth: comedy, romance, tragedy, and irony/satire.
human beings project their narrative imaginations in two fundamental ways
Ideal world and real world
Ideal World
Is the world of innocence, plenitude, and fulfillment. Frye calls it the mythos of summer, and he associates it with the genre of romance.
Real world
Is the world of experience, uncertainty, and failure. Frye calls it the mythos of winter, and he associates it with the double genre of irony/satire. Irony is the real world seen through a tragic lens, Satire is the real world seen through a comic lens.
Mythos of autumn
Tragedy involves a movement from the ideal world to the real world
Mythos of spring
comedy involves a movement from the real world to the ideal
Master Plot
Is the structure of the quest, of which each mythos represents one leg. Represented by the four seasons of mythos.
Conflict
The basis of romance, which consists of a series of fantastic adventures in which superheroes encounter obstacles.
Catastrophe
The basis of tragedy, which consists of the hero’s downfall.
Disorder and confusion
The basis of irony and satire, which require that confusion and anarchy reign supreme and that effective action be impossible.
Triumph
The basis of comedy, in which the protagonist and his or her beloved become the centerpiece of some sort of improved social order.
total quest‑myth
Conflict, catastrophe, disorder & confusion, and triumph
Archetype
a kind of supertype, or model, different versions of which recur throughout the history of human production.
Theory of modes (Frye)
Frye’s classification of modes based on the protagonist’s power to take action as it compares to the power of other men and to the power of their environment.
Robert Scholes offers a different version of Frye’s modes
genres by eliminating the nonliterary mode of myth and inserting a new category in order to account for the difference between comedy and realism.
The structure of narrative (narratology)
examine in minute detail the inner “workings” of literary texts in order to discover the fundamental structural units that govern texts’ narrative operations.
Greimas observes that human beings make meaning by structuring the world in terms of two kinds of opposed pairs
its opposite (the opposite of love is hate) and its negation (the negation of love is the absence of love).
the forwarding of the plot
involves the transfer of some entity (a quality or an object) from one actant to another
Contractual structures
involve the making/breaking of agreements or the establishment/violation of prohibitions and the alienation or reconciliation that follows.
Performative structures
involve the performance of tasks, trials, struggles, and the like.
Disjunctive structures
involve travel, movement, arrivals, and departures
structural units of language
parts of speech and their arrangement in sentences and paragraph
Proposition
Is formed by combining a character with an irreducible action (for example, “X kills Y” or “X arrives in town”) or irreducible attribute (for example, “X is evil” or “X is queen”).
Sequence
string of propositions that can stand on its own as a story.
Todorov finds that all attributes can be reduced to three categories of adjectives
states (unstable attributes, such as happiness and unhappiness), qualities (more stable attributes, such as good and evil), and conditions (the most stable attributes, such as one’s sex, religion, or social position)
Genette begins by differentiating among three levels of narrative:
1) Story: Consists of the succession of events being narrated. The story thus provides the content of the tale in the order in which events “actually happened” to the characters, an order that does not always coincide with the order in which they are presented in the narrative.
2) Narrative: Refers to the actual words on the page, the discourse, the text itself, from which the reader constructs both story and narration. The narrative is produced by the narrator in the act of narration.
3) Narration: Refers to the act of telling the story to some audience and thereby producing the narrative. However, just as the narrator almost never corresponds exactly to the author, the audience (narratee) almost never corresponds exactly to the reader.
Story, narrative, and narration interact by means of three qualities:
1) Tense: is the arrangement of events in the narrative with respect to time. That arrangement involves the notions of order, duration, and frequency.
2) Mood: The atmosphere of the narrative created by distance and perspective.
3) Voice: Refers to the voice of the narrator.
According to Jonathan Culler, the structural system that governs both the writing and interpretation of literary texts is
the system of rules and codes, which we have consciously or unconsciously internalized, that tell us how to make meaning when we read literature.
1) The convention of distance and impersonality
As soon as we know we’re reading a piece of fiction or poetry rather than a letter or journal, we read it differently than we would read a real letter or journal.
2) Naturalization:
The process by which we transform the text so that the strangeness of its literary form to makes sense in terms of the world we live in.
3) The rule of significance:
The assumption that the literary work expresses a significant attitude about some important problem, and so we pay attention to what it says in ways that we wouldn’t do with other kinds of writing.
4) The rule of metaphorical coherence
The requirement that the two components of a metaphor (the vehicle, or metaphorical term, and the tenor, or subject to which the metaphor is applied) have a consistent relationship within the context of the work.
5) The rule of thematic unity
our expectation that the literary work has a unified, coherent theme, or main point.
