1) Definition, History- Structuralism

Structuralism showed up in 20th century along with the appearance of Course in

General Linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure. The principles of linguistics which
proposed by Ferdinand de Saussure suggest new method of language research and
different from historical approach which used before this view appear. Ferdinand
de Saussure is the first person who formulates the way to analyze the language
systematically which also can be used to analyze signs system. Structuralism is a
conceptual and methodological approach to describing and analyzing a variety of
objects of inquiry including cultures, economics, language, literature, mythologies,
politics, and societies. A structuralist analysis assumes that these objects of inquiry
can be characterized by underlying structures conceived as systems of interrelated
parts and that they can be defined (at least in part) by relationships among these
constitutive elements.
Roland Barthes
One of Saussure’s most powerful interpreters in the matter of semiotics has been
Roland Barthes. In his essay Myth Today, he puts the case that any semiotic
analysis must postulate a relationship between the two terms signifier and signified
which is not one of ‘equality’ but of ‘equivalence’. What we grasp in the
relationship is not the sequential ordering whereby one term leads to the other, but
the correlation which unites them. In respect of language this ‘structural
relationship’ between sound-image (signifier) and concept (signified) constitutes
what Saussure calls the linguistic sign. In respect of non-linguistic systems, says
Barthes, this ‘associative total’ of signifier and signified constitutes simply the
sign.
Claude Levi-Strauss
If Structuralism and Semiotics has any originality – and as an introductory text it
modestly aspired to have none – it lies in the suggestion that the origins of
structuralism are to be found in the United States as much as in France: that the
influence of American structural linguistics on French anthropologists such as
Claude Lévi-Strauss was crucial to its development and thus, in my own
experience, to a formative change in our ways of thinking about the world. The
notion of a myth-making ‘poetic wisdom’ which animates the response to the
world of so-called ‘primitive peoples’ is a fundamental principle of Lévi-Strauss’s
thought. Like the linguist, he sets out to identify the genuinely constitutive
elements of what appears at first sight to be an apparently disparate and shapeless
mass of phenomena. His method, fundamentally, involves the application to this
non-linguistic material of the principles of what he himself terms the ‘phonological
revolution’ brought about by the linguist’s concept of the phoneme. That is, he
attempts to perceive the constituents of cultural behaviour, ceremonies, rites,
kinship relations, marriage laws, methods of cooking, totemic systems, not as
intrinsic or discrete entities, but in terms of the contrastive relationships they have
with each other that make their structures analogous to the phonemic structure of a
language-
 Kinship: All societies have ‘kinship’ systems: that is, sets of ‘rules’
concerning who may and more often who may not marry whom and
prescribing the nature of familial relationships at large. Lévi-Strauss
proposes that such systems or structures may be homologous with the
structure of the language of the society involved in them.
 Myth: The relationship between language and myth thus occupies a central
position in Lévi-Strauss’s view of the ‘savage’ mind, and he argues that the
nature of that mind reveals itself in the structures of its myths as much as in
the structure of its language. Lévi-Strauss’s concern is ultimately with the
extent to which the structures of myths prove actually formative as well as
reflective of men’s minds: the degree to which they dissolve the distinction
between nature and culture. As in the case of kinship, the ‘unconscious’
structure of myth turns out to yield itself most readily to a ‘phonemic’
analysis of its phenomena, whereby the fantastic profusion of myths in the
world may be reduced to a manageable number of recurrent elements, whose
presence has genuine structural and structuring significance.

2) The basic assumption and principle

Saussure introduced Structuralism in Linguistics, marking a revolutionary break in
the study of language, which had till then been historical and philological. In
his Course in General Linguistics (1916), Saussure saw language as a system of
signs constructed by convention. Understanding meaning to be relational, being
produced by the interaction between various signifiers and signifieds, he held that
meaning cannot be understood in isolation.
i. Meaning is Arbitrary: He questioned the conventional “correspondence
theory of meaning” and argued that meaning is arbitrary, and that language
 does not merely reflect the world, but constitutes it.  He was undermining
the very notion of language by proposing the relationship between words
and meanings as arbitrary. The structure of language ensures that when we
use words, however arbitrary their meaning might be, we register certain
differences and make sense of them.
ii. Meaning of Words are Relational: His conception of meaning was
purely structural and relational rather than referential: primacy is given to
relationships rather than to things. Words make sense to us, or have 'value'
(Saussure's term) for us in their relationality: in their difference from other
words. Words are therefore related to each other in the form of difference
and have no absolute value of their own. The meaning of signs was seen as
lying in their systematic relation to each other rather than deriving from any
inherent features of signifiers or any reference to material things. Saussure's
relational conception of meaning was specifically differential: he
emphasized the differences between signs.
iii. Meaning is always attributed to the object/idea by Human Mind:
Ferdinand De Saussure says,

"Meaning is always attributed to the object or idea by the human mind, and
constructed by and expressed through language: it is not merely contained in
the thing."

It means that the choice is left for the human mind. The structure of
language, or the system, ensures that we recognize difference. Well-known
examples of this process would be the choice between paired alternatives
like 'terrorist' or 'freedom fighter'. There is no neutral or objective way of
designating such a person, merely a choice of two terms which construct that
person in certain ways. It has been said that there are three versions of every
story, your version, my version, and the truth, but the case here is more
complicated than that, since all the available terms are purely linguistic -
there is no truth about these matters which exists securely outside language.

Major Principles of Structuralism:

 Meaning occurs through difference and SIGNS’ relationship to each

other. Meaning is not identification of the sign with object in the real
world or with some pre-existent concept or essential reality; rather it
 is generated by difference among signs in a signifying system. Ex:
woman vs. lady. The meaning of the words "woman" and "lady" are
established by their relations to one another in a meaning-field. They
both refer to a human female, but what constitutes "human" and what
constitutes "female" are themselves established through difference,
not identity with any essence, or ideal truth, or the like.

 Much of our imaginative world is structured in binary sets (opposites)

which assign structure and meaning to signs.  Structuralism notes that
much of our imaginative world is structured of, and structured by,
binary oppositions (being/nothingness, hot/cold, culture/nature); these
oppositions structure meaning, and one can describe fields of cultural
thought, or topoi, by describing the binary sets which compose them.
Ex: cruel vs. humane. Forms the basis of SEMIOTICS, the study of
signs.
  Structuralism forms the basis for semiotics, the study of signs: a sign
is a union of signifier and signified, and is anything that stands for
anything else. Sign = union of SIGNIFIER and SIGNIFIED. Ex: c-a-t,
fuzzy critter that goes “meow”
  Central too to semiotics is the idea of codes, which give signs context
-cultural codes, literary codes, etc. The study of semiotics and of
codes opens up literary study to cultural study, and expands the
resources of the critic in discussing the meaning of texts. CODES
provide signs with context - cultural context, literary context, etc.
 Relations among signs are of two sorts, contiguity and substitutability,
the axes of combination and selection: hence of the existence of all
'grammars', hence all substitutions, hence the ability to know
something by something else, or by a part of it in some way -- hence
metonymy and metaphor. The conception of combination and
selection provides the basis for an analysis of 'literariness' or
'poeticality' in the use, repetition and variation of sound patterns and
combinations. It also provides keys to the most fundamental elements
of culture.
 Emphasizes that humans create meaning. The value of the conception
is that it allows us to 'open up', conceptually, the inner world of
humans, to see the relation of human experience to cultural
experience, to talk cogently of meaning as something that is structured
into our 'selves'. There is no attempt here to challenge the
 meaningfulness of persons; there is an attempt of dethrone the
ideology of the ego, the idea that the self is an eternal, indivisible
essence, and an attempt to redefine what it is to be a person. The self
is, like other things, signified and culturally constructed. Post-
structuralism, in particular, will insist that the subject is de-centered.
 Structuralism, then, allows us to examine our relationships with
literature, art, society, etc.
 Our sense of self -- our consciousness -- exists in relation to outside
collective influences. Structuralism introduces the idea of the 'subject',
as opposed to the idea of the individual as a stable indivisible ego. The
conception of the constructed subject opens up the borders between
the conscious and the unconscious. The unconscious itself is not some
strange, impenetrable realm of private meaning but is constructed
through the sign-systems and through the repressions of the culture.
Both the self and the unconscious are cultural constructs.
 In the view of structuralism our knowledge of 'reality' is not only
coded but also conventional, that is, structured by and through
conventions, made up of signs and signifying practices. This is known
as "the social construction of reality." Reality is conventional; our
perceptions of the world around us are bound up in conventions,
codes, signs, etc.

3) Major Characteristics

 Meaning occurs through difference: Meaning is not identification of the

sign with object in the real world or with some pre-existent concept or
essential reality; rather it is generated by difference among signs in a
signifying system. For instance, the meaning of the words "woman" and
"lady" are established by their relations to one another in a meaning-field.
They both refer to a human female, but what constitutes "human" and what
constitutes "female" are themselves established through difference, not
identity with any essence, or ideal truth, or the like.

 Relations among signs are of two types, contiguity and substitutability:

The axes of combination and selection: hence of the existence of all
 'grammars', hence all substitutions, hence the ability to know something by
something else, or by a part of it in some way -- hence metonymy and
metaphor. The conception of combination and selection provides the basis
for an analysis of 'literariness' or 'poeticality' in the use, repetition and
variation of sound patterns and combinations. It also provides keys to the
most fundamental elements of culture.

 Our world of imaginative world is structured of and structured by

binary
Oppositions:  Structuralism notes that much of our imaginative world is
structured of, and structured by, binary oppositions (being/nothingness,
hot/cold, culture/nature); these oppositions structure meaning, and one can
describe fields of cultural thought, or topoi, by describing the binary sets
which compose them.

 Structuralism forms the basis of semiotics: Semi biotics is the study of

signs: a sign is a union of signifier and signified, and is anything that stands
for anything else.

 In semiotics and structuralism, the idea of codes is central: Central to

semiotics is the idea of codes, which give signs context -- cultural codes,
literary codes, etc. The study of semiotics and of codes opens up literary
study to cultural study, and expands the resources of the critic in discussing
the meaning of texts. 

 According to structuralism every individual is a subject and human

reality is a construction: The term 'subject' foregrounds the relationship
between ethnology, psychoanalysis, and semiotics. It helps us to conceive of
human reality as a construction, as the product of signifying activities which
are both culturally specific and generally unconscious. The category of the
subject thus calls into question the notions both of the private, and of a self-
synonymous with consciousness. It suggests that even desire is culturally
instigated, and hence collective; and it de-centers consciousness, relegating
it....to a purely receptive capacity. Finally, by drawing attention to the
divisions which separate one area of psychic activity from another, the term
'subject' challenges the value of stability attributed to the individual.

 Our reality is coded and constructed through conventions that is made

up of signs and signifying practices: This is known as "the social
construction of reality." There is, then, in structuralism, a coherent
 connection among the conceptions of reality, the social, the individual, the
unconscious: they are all composed of the same signs, codes and
conventions, all working according to similar laws.

 Structuralism relates reading a text to reading a culture: Through

semiotics, structuralism leads us to see everything as 'textual', that is,
composed of signs, governed by conventions of meaning, ordered according
to a pattern of relationships. When the rules of literary meaning are seen as
just another set of rules for a signifying arena of a culture, then literature
loses some aspects of its privileged status, but gains in the strength and
cogency of its relationship to other areas of signification. Hence literary
study has expanded to the study of textuality, popular writing has been
opened up to serious study, and the grounds for the relationship between the
meaning-conventions of literature and the way in which a culture imagines
reality have been set, and we can speak more clearly of the relation of
literary to cultural (or, 'human', or 'every-day') meanings.

 It enables us to read a text historically and trans-culturally: Whenever

we have to look more objectively, when we are transversing barriers of time,
say, or of culture or interest, then the structural method, the search for
principles of order, coherence and meaning, become dominant.

 It encourages cultural, context based and genre-based analysis of

literary text: One convention of literature is that there is a persona who is
articulating the text -- that it comes from some organizing consciousness
which can be commented on and described. Genre is another convention:
each genre designates certain kinds of action as acceptable and excludes
others.

4) Concepts of structuralism

a) SIGN

A sign is the basic unit of langue (a given language at a given time). Every
langue is a complete system of signs. The sign is divided into two elements:

i. The signifier- a sound-image, or its graphic equivalent

ii. The signified- the concept or meaning
 i. Signifier:

The signifier is the material aspect of the sign -- the word on paper, the spoken
word, or a traffic sign or a supermarket. First there’s the bit that you can see or
hear. One can imagine signs that are accessible to each of the senses. Audible
and visible signs have priority for Saussure because they are the types of sign
that make up most of our known languages. Such signs are called "verbal" signs
(from the Latin verba meaning "word"). The sensible part of a verbal sign (the
part accessible to the senses) is the part you see or hear. This is its signifier.

Example: The laboratory technicians at Channel, for instance, have an acute

receptivity to the smallest nuanced difference between scents. In this case they
are literally "readers" or "interpreters" of scent in so far as they are able to
identify minute differences. So, if one can see, hear, touch, taste or smell it then
he can probably interpret it and it is likely to have some meaning for him.

ii. Signified:

The signified is the concept that results in your mind -- the idea of a dog, or a
chair, or liberty or whatever. That meaning is not inside something, but is the
product of a set of relationships, often negatively defined. And that we do not
have direct access through language to reality itself. And, most eerily, although
we only saw the mark, we simultaneously heard it in our heads--not actually but
that part of our brain that listens out for sounds took one look at a non-existent
word and heard something too. The signified is what these visible/audible
aspects mean to us. Now we know very well that some marks mean very
different things to different people at different times. The signified is thus
always something of an interpretation that is added to the signifier.

Example: The word "cat" can mean "ginger monster" to one but to another it
means cuddly old much maligned softy who is only innocently going about its
business.

b) Langue and Parole

The distinction between the French words, langue (language or tongue) and parole
(speech), enters the vocabulary of theoretical linguistics with Ferdinand de
Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics, which was published posthumously in
1915 after having been collocated from student notes. Ferdinand De Saussure is
regarded by many as the creator of the modern theory of structuralism, to which his
langue and parole are integral. He believed that a word’s meaning is based less on
the object it refers to and more in its structure. There are two primary components
of language according to Ferdinand de Saussure and modern structuralism. They
are-
 Langue
 Parole.

 Langue: Langue represents the “work of a collective intelligence,” which

is both internal to each individual and collective, in so far as it is beyond
the will of any individual to change. Langue consists in the homogeneous
social product that has the potential of speech and is comprised of
distinctive linguistic attributes and is defined as the normal and
traditional social product of the faculty of speech which will be
accumulated in every individual’s brain in the speech community after
listening to many speeches. Langue is explained by Saussure by the
analogy he makes between langue and similar copies of the same
dictionary issued for every individual.
To sum up,
 Langue encompasses the abstract, systematic rules and conventions of a
signifying system.
 It is independent of, and pre-exists, individual users.
 Langue involves the principles of language, without which no meaningful
utterance, "parole", would be possible.

 Parole: Parole designates individual acts, statements and utterances,

events of language use manifesting each time a speaker’s ephemeral
individual will through his combination of concepts and his
“phonation”—the formal aspects of the utterance. This adds another
dimension to the chosen word’s meaning. Parole indicates the noticeable
indication of this faculty. Since parole is by nature heterogeneous, it
indicates the defective reflections that have been involved in the structure
of the language and, thus, Saussurian linguistics gravitated to the study of
langue. To sum up,
 This is the individual, personal phenomenon of language (as a series
of speech acts made by a linguistic subject)
  It is the usage of the system but not the system.
 It is the actual utterance (actual manifestation of language)
 Saussure did not concern himself overly with parole rather on Langue;
however,
 the structure of langue is revealed through the study of parole.

He also makes a distinction between langue (language)

and parole (speaking), though the two are not to be considered opposites
but closely associated with each other and interdependent.
Example:
 Saussure drew an analogy to chess to explain the concept of langue
and parole. He compared langue to the rules of chess—the norms
for playing the game—and compared the moves that an individual
chooses to make—the individual's preferences in playing the game
—to the parole.
 Speaking, as the most immediate instance of language use and
manifestation, is considered essential to the structure of a
language. However, speaking, and by the same token all linguistic
utterances, are instances of parole and langue is the system that
governs all linguistic productions.

c) Code
Roland Barthes, a French structuralist, philosopher and linguist described and
demonstrated methods of literary analysis. Barthes presents his theory of five
codes to understand the underlying structure of a text. In other words, through the
study of these codes we can either recognize that which genre the text belongs to,
or recognize the characteristics of an already established genre. Barthes identified
five codes-
 Hermeneutic code
 Proairetic code
 Semantic code
 Symbolic code
 Cultural code.
A brief description of these codes is necessary before moving any further.
 The Hermeneutic Code
The hermeneutic code is also called the enigmatic code. It refers to those elements
of a text that are mysterious, puzzling and unexplained or incompletely explained
in the narrative and so make the reader curios to know or understand them. In
Barthes terms these elements are termed as: “snare”, “equivocation”, “jamming”
and “suspended answers”. Some of the enigmatic elements are answered in the end
of the text while some of them remain a mystery for the reader. The reader uses
his/her mental faculty to give meaning to the text.
Example: The best example may well be the genre of the detective story. We
witness a murder and the rest of the narrative is devoted to determining the
questions that are raised by the initial scene of violence. The detective spends the
story reading the clues that, only at the end, reconstructs the story of the murder.
See the Star Trek Lesson Plan for an example of a television episode that invokes
this code.
 The Proairetic Code
The proairetic code is also called the code of actions. It refers to those elements
that create suspense in the text and catches the interest of the reader. Every action
of suspense held what comes next, What happens next? In this way it keeps the
interest of reader alive for the coming actions.
Example:  A gunslinger draws his gun in a story and we wonder what the
resolution of this action will be. We wait if he kills his opponent or is wounded
himself. Suspense is thus created by action rather than by a reader's or a viewer's
wish to have mysteries explained.
 The Semic Code
The semic code is also called the connotative code. This code refers to those
elements that give some additional meaning or connotative meaning. The
connotative meaning is often found in the characterization. This code is also
related with theme.
Example: Beowulf is often used as sign of bravery,strength.
 The Symbolic Code
Symbolic code is also known as antithetical code. This code is in some way similar
as the previous code (semantic code). However, the operation of symbolic code is
wider and sets a deeper level of meaning than the previous one. The central point
of this code is actually the existence of opposition or antithetical ideas. Often, it
closely corresponds to the concept of binary opposition in order to unveil the
hidden messages through this symbolic code where new meanings possibly come
across from conflicting and opposing ideas.
 The Cultural Code
The last code is also known as the referential code. It refers to the elements that
give common knowledge. By this code a reader gets the physical, physiological,
medical, psychological, literary or historical knowledge.
Example: The gnomic code is one of the cultural codes and refers to those cultural
codes that are tied to clichés, proverbs or popular sayings of various sorts.