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Structuralism and Poststructuralism: Meaning and Key Concepts
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This lecture notes discusses the topic "structuralism and poststructuralism".
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Structuralism and Poststructuralism: Meaning and Key ConceptsStructuralism is one of the most influential intellectual movements in the twentieth-
century which embraces a wide variety of intellectual disciplines, such as linguistics,
aesthetics, anthropology, sociology, and psychoanalysis. But it must be noted that
structuralism is above all a “method”.
As a method, structuralism aims to analyze isolated events or meanings in terms of their
underlying structural laws. It seeks to comprehend "particulars" by describing their
interrelationship within the totality of general codes which govern them. It also looks for
the deep and other hidden structures beneath the surface manifestations of meaning.
Structuralism, therefore, can be broadly defined as an attempt to unify the human
sciences by applying a single methodology derived from Ferdinand de Saussure’s model
of linguistics. As is well known, Ferdinand de Saussure is generally recognized as the
founding father of the structuralist method of analysis.
The great originality of Saussure’s approach was to treat language as a self-regulating
rather than a self-referential system of signs. In other words, he argued that language
should be analyzed in terms of its internal “structures” (that is, what language is in itself
as a formal system of relations) and not, as had traditionally been the case, simply in
terms of its contents (or what language is about, that is, what it refers to).
The general linguistic model derives from Saussure’s insight that a language is not a
nomenclature or a list of names of things, but a system of signs consisting of a “signifier”
and a “signified”. For Saussure, signs do not designate an external reality or referent and
are meaningful only because of the similarities and differences that exist between them.
In the case of Roland Barthes, the overall project of structuralism was to develop a
universal “semiology” or a theory of signs applicable to all areas of human activity.
By the late 1940s, Claude Lévi-Strauss was applying the lessons of what he called the
“Copernican Revolution” brought about by structural linguistics to the analysis of both
kinship system and mythology. His analysis of both is based upon the classically
structuralist thesis that the relations between observable phenomena are more
important than the phenomena themselves.
In the literary domain, structuralism has been a very productive theory. At a more
general level, the structuralist theory of literature is concerned mainly with the
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