Notes on Structuralism

[from Literary Theory,Literary Theory, An Introduction by Terry Eagleton; pages

70-90]
Northrop Frye: Literature itself had a system that was created through objective
laws throughout history (modes, myth and genres). The four narrative categories
of literature were comic, romantic, tragic and ironic, coinciding with the
seasons, and by identifying the literary categories, we can identify literary modes
for example, the hero is totally superior to others in the myth, in the romantic
he is superior in degree. To analyse literature fully, we must expel history from it
and analyse it using literary history only. Literature is as religion.
Structuralism is obsessed with structures and the laws that govern structures.
Individual works become mere instances of a law or laws, and the meaning of
one work depends upon its individual units and the relationships between them
for example, an image of a sun and a moon in a poem is a structure, but
structuralists believe that the meaning of one depends upon its relation to the
other. Their meaning is relational, and thus all you need to know to infer meaning
is found within the work. This also means that, as long as the relationships
between the elements remain unchanged even if the elements are changed
then the story will remain the same. The individual items themselves have no
special symbolism or meaning.
Structuralism is analytical, indifferent to cultural value and goes deeper than
face value to analyse the structure of a text.
Ferdinand de Saussure:
Language as a system of signs that should be studied as a complete system at a
given point in time, and not diachronically, i.e. in its historical development. Each
sign was made up of a signifier (a sound or word) and a signified (the
image/concept).
Ex: c-a-t the written is the signifier while the signified is cat, what the
letters spell out. The relationship between them is arbitrary. This is also
true for the whole word cat and what it refers to, the actual animal (the
referent).
Each word, thus, has meaning only because it is different to others cats
meaning exists in the fact that it is not cap, cad or bat.
Furthermore, parole actual speech is fluff and not to be studied; the
importance lies in langue, the structure of signs that make speech possible in the
first place. The referent is not important either.
Historical change affects the individual parts of a language which, in turn, affects
the whole language. Change is, therefore, disturbance and disequilibrium in an
otherwise conflict-free system. It is also something that happens by accident.
Jakobson:

The poetic is about a language in self-conscious relationship to itself that is, the
poetic functioning of language promotes signs and draws attention to their
material qualities rather than simply using them in communication. In the poetic,
the sign is pulled away from its object, which gives it a certain independence.
Metaphors one sign is substituted for another because it is similar to it.
Metonymic one sign is associated with another. We can make metaphors
because we have a series of signs which are equivalent to one another, such as
passion and flame. The poetic, however, picks equivalents based on the pattern
or on their appearance, on their structure; they combine equivalences based on
sound, meaning, rhythm. Poems, for Jakobson, were to be viewed as structures
where he signifiers and signifieds had a single set of relations which are to be
studied by their own, and not as reflections of something external. The text
becomes an autonomous object.
Czech structuralists also insisted that each work was to be considered as one
part of a whole.
Structuralism and narratology:
Claude Levi-Strauss different myths as variations of different themes. Myths
were a kind of language which could be broken down into individual units. They
acquired meaning only when combined together in particular ways, and the rules
could be seen as grammer, a set of relations which would explain the narratives
true meaning. Levi-Strauss believed that the relations were inherent in the
human mind; by studying a narrative, we are studying universal mental
operations they become a way of understanding and organizing reality.
Vladimir Propp seven spheres of action and 31 fixed elements make up all folk
tale by combining the spheres of action in different ways. A.J. Greimas also
added the idea of a structural unit, an actant (Subject, Object, Sender, Reciever,
Helper, Opponent) which swallow up Propps spheres of action. Tzetan Todorov
does the same with the Decameron by reducing all the characters to nouns and
their actions as verbs, does allowing every story of the Decameron to be read as
a kind of extended sentence.
Gerard Genette recit, the actual order of events in the text; histoire the
sequence in which those events actually occurred; narration the act of
narrating. The first two can be considered as plot and story. There are also five
central categories of narrative analysis order (time order of narrative, including
prolepsis/anticipation; analepsis/flashback); duration (time spent on narrations
episodes); frequency (did an event happen once and was narrated once, or was
it narrated several times but happened once?); mood distance (relation of the
narration to its materials, i.e. is it recounting the story [diagesis] or representing
it [mimesis?] and is it told in free/direct/indirect speech?) and perspective (point
of view).
With point of view, the narrator may know more or less than the
characters, the narrative may be delivered by an omniscient narrator or
recounted by one character from within the story in one fixed position or In
variable positions, or it may be recounted by several characters. There is
also the matter of external focalization the narrator knows less than the
characters.

There is also voice the act of narrating. A narrator may be heterodiegetic

(absent from his own narrative), homodiegetic (inside his narrative, i.e. first
person) or autodigetic (he is inside the narrative and is the main character, such
as Harry Potter). Ergo, it alerts us to the difference between narration the
act/process of telling a story and narrative what is actually said.
Gains of structuralism:
Demystification of literature literary work is a construct that can be analysed
just like anything else. Moreover, it questions the uniqueness of literature.
Structure can be found in both high brow and low brow literature, and it is no
longer easy to assign literature a status of privilege just because it is literature.
Meaning as a shared system of signification omitted the idea that it was a private
or subjective experience; the individual was the subject of language, so the way
the world is interpreted is through the languages one knows and has at their
disposal. Reality is produced by language the sign-systems we had available to
us make the world as it is.