Significantly, cultural communities determine the meanings and relationships of signs. Signs are meaningful only because of the similarities or differences that exist between them (365). As David Macey notes in The Penguin Dictionary of Critical Theory, signs do not designate an external reality. The relationship of the signifier to the signified determines the meaning of the sign. Two parts constitute a sign: the signifier (a spoken mark) and the signified (a concept):įor example, when someone says the word “tree,” the sound he or she makes is the signifier, and the concept of a tree is the signified. These notes present a structuralist approach to language that focuses on an abstract system of signs.
The seminal text of structuralism is Ferdinand de Saussure’s published collection of lecture notes, Course in General Linguistics (1915). Structuralism enjoyed popularity in the 1950s and 1960s in both European and American literary theory and criticism. Structuralism first developed in Anthropology (Claude Lévi-Strauss), in literary and cultural studies (Roman Jakobson, Roland Barthes, and Gérard Genette), psychoanalysis, and intellectual history (Culler 17). Unlike Formalist critics or New Critics, structuralist critics are primarily interested in the codes, signs, and rules that govern social and cultural practices, including communication. Words inscribed with meaning may be compared to other words and structures to determine their meaning. Structuralism focuses on literature as a system of signs in which meaning is constructed within a context. The popular structuralist critic Terence Hawkes defines structuralism as a way of thinking about the world which is predominantly concerned with the description of structures (17). Criticism that uses a structuralist approach analyzes patterns, narrative operations, and/or codes of operation to interpret the text and the culture from which it emerges, exploring underlying structures that make the creation of meaning possible.
Cultural communities determine the meanings and relationships of signs. Key Terms: Dialectic Hermeneutics Semiotics Text & Intertextuality Tone Key Terms Definitions Sign the basic unit of Saussurean linguistics, a physical entity consisting of a signifier (an acoustic image) and a signified (a concept) a sign is said to be arbitrary because a logical relationship between the signifier and signified does not necessarily exist Referent the extra-linguistic object to which a sign refers the relationship between the sign and referent are also arbitrary and conventional Binary Opposition a pair of related terms or concepts that appear to be opposite in meaning (e.g., light/dark) a genre of discourse employed by literary critics used to share the results of their interpretive efforts.
a research method, a type of textual research, that literary critics use to interpret texts.
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