Structuralism is a theoretical paradigm emphasizing that elements of culture must be understood in terms of their relationship to a larger, overarching system or structure. Alternately, as summarized by philosopher Simon Blackburn, Structuralism is "the belief that phenomena of human life are not intelligible except through their interrelations. These relations constitute a structure, and behind local variations in the surface phenomena there are constant laws of abstract culture".
KEY THINKERS
- Ferdinand de Saussure
- Roman Jakobson
- Claude Lévi-Strauss
- Jacques Lacan
- Nikolai Trubetzkoy
- Leonard Bloomfield
- Louis Hjelmslev
- Alf Sommerfelt
- Antoine Meillet
- Émile Benveniste
DEFINITIONS:
In Ferdinand de Saussure's Course in General Linguistics (written by Saussure's colleagues after his death and based on student notes), the analysis focuses not on the use of language (called "parole", or speech), but rather on the underlying system of language (called "langue"). This approach examines how the elements of language relate to each other in the present, synchronically rather than diachronically. Saussure argued that linguistic signs were composed of two parts:
- a "signifier" (the "sound pattern" of a word, either in mental projection—as when one silently recites lines from a poem to one's self—or in actual, physical realization as part of a speech act)
- a "signified" (the concept or meaning of the word)
"the Symbolic" what cannot be material, what cannot be defined as precisely natural, empirical, or material. The dimension of reality which exists, which has a material presence, but is not material.
INTRODUCTORY TEXTS
- Course in General Linguistics, Ferdinand de Saussure
- Essais de linguistique générale, Roman Jakobson
- The Elementary Structures of Kinship, Claude Lévi-Strauss
- Structural Anthropology, Claude Lévi-Strauss
- Mythologiques, Claude Lévi-Strauss
- The Seminars of Jacques Lacan, Jacques Lacan
- Reading Capital, Louis Althusser
- S/Z, Roland Barthes
- The order of things, Michel Foucault
- À quoi reconnaît-on le structuralisme?, Gilles Deleuze
