What is Structuralism?

•A French movement of the 1950s closely associated with Russian Formalism, Prague School and Polish
Structuralism (itself based on Stylistics)
•A departure from Humanism
•Concerned with the underlying relations constituting language and all symbolic systems
•A way of thinking about the world predominantly concerned with the perceptions & description of
structures
•Claims that the nature of every entity in any situation has no significance by itself, and
in fact is determined by all the other entities involved in that situation
•Nothing can be understood in isolation
• Full significance of any entity cannot be perceived unless and until it is integrated into the structure of
which it forms a part
•Contexts of larger structures do not exist by themselves. These are formed by our
way of perceiving the world.
•Meaning is attributed
•All human activity is constructed (not natural or “essential”)
Major Figures
•Ferdinand de Saussure •Claude Lévi-Strauss
•Roland Barthes •A. J. Greimas
• Jonathan Culler •Roman Jakobson
•Vladimir Propp •Terence Hawkes
•Gerard Genette • Jean Piaget • Louis Althusser

Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913)

•Roots of Structuralism
• Lectures and theories of early 20th century Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure at
the University of Geneva
•Course in General Linguistics (1916)
•Published posthumously from lecture notes in 1916 by Charles Bally and Albert
Sechehaye
• The object of linguistics is not language, but LANGUE and PAROLE
• Language exists beyond speech, beyond the individual, beyond things
•Move away from historical study of language to structures, functions
• Laid the foundations of Semiotics

Structuralism as a philosophical stance

•Structuralists are interested in the interrelationship between
•UNITS (also called "surface phenomena")
•RULES (the ways that units can be put together)
• In language
•Units are words and the rules are the forms of grammar which order words
• In different languages, the grammar rules are different, as are the words, but the structure is still
the same in all languages: words are put together within a grammatical system to make meaning.

An Example
•Cinderella
•Characters: princess, stepmother, prince •Plotline: a princess is persecuted by a stepmother and
rescued (and married) by a prince •Units: princess, stepmother, and prince
•Rules: stepmothers are evil, princesses are victims, and princes and princesses have to marry.
•Structuralist analyses of literature identify such underlying structures

Structuralist notions on units and rules

•Structuralists believe that the underlying structures which organize units and rules into meaningful
systems are generated by the human mind itself, and not by sense perception.
•As such, the mind is itself a structuring mechanism which looks through units and files them according
to rules.
•So structuralism sees itself as a science of humankind, and works to uncover all the structures that
underlie all the things that humans do, think, perceive, and feel
These structures are universal
•Every human mind in every culture at every point in history has used some sort of structuring principle
to organize and understand cultural phenomena.
•Every human culture has some sort of language, which has the basic structure of all languages:
words/phonemes are combined according to a grammar of rules to produce meaning.
•Every human culture similarly has some sort of social organization
•All of these organizations are governed, according to structuralist analyses, by structures which are
universal.

Properties of a Structure
•Wholeness. This means that the system functions as a whole, not just as a collection of independent
parts.
• Transformation. This means that the system is not static, but capable of change. New units can enter the
system, but when they do they're governed by the rules of the system.
•Self-Regulation. This is related to the idea of transformation. You can add elements to the system, but
you can't change the basic structure of the system no matter what you add to it. The transformations of a
system never lead to anything outside the system.

Saussure’s ideas on linguistics

• I: THE NATURE OF THE LINGUISTIC SIGN
• Language is not a mere NAMING process, by which things get associated with a word or name. Instead
of uniting a thing with a name, the linguistic sign unites a concept with a sound-image
• The linguistic SIGN (a key word) is made of the union of a concept and a sound image. A more
common way to define a linguistic SIGN is that a SIGN is the combination of a SIGNIFIER and a
SIGNIFIED. Saussure says the sound image is the SIGNIFIER and the concept the SIGNIFIED.
II: LINGUISTIC VALUE
• Thought is a shapeless mass, which is only ordered by language
•No ideas preexist language; language itself gives shape to ideas and makes them expressible.
• The VALUE of a sign is determined, however, not by what signifiers get linked to what particular
signifieds
•But rather by the whole system of signs used within a community
•VALUE is the product of a system or structure (LANGUE), not the result of individual
relations (PAROLE).
III.SYNTAGMATIC AND ASSOCIATIVE RELATIONS
• The most important kind of relation between units in a signifying system, is a SYNTAGMATIC
relation.
•Basically, a LINEAR relation
• In spoken or written language, words come out one by one
•Because language is linear, it forms a chain, by which one unit is linked to the next.
Syntagms
•Combinations or relations formed by position within a chain are called SYNTAGMS.
• Language is constituted by strings of linguistic objects: words, phonemes or
morphemes
•Each object contrasts with the other objects
• The terms within a syntagm acquire VALUE only because they stand in opposition to
everything before or after them. Each term IS something because it is NOT something
else in the sequence.
•SYNTAGMATIC relations are most crucial in written and spoken language, where the
ideas of time, linearity, and syntactical meaning are important.

Associative Relations
•Signs are stored in your memory, for example, not in syntagmatic links or sentences, but in
ASSOCIATIVE groups.
• "Education" — "-tion": education, relation, association
•Similar associations: education, teacher, textbook, college.
•Random set of linkages: education, baseball, computer games, psychoanalysis
•ASSOCIATIVE relations are only in your head, not in the structure of language itself, whereas
SYNTAGMATIC relations are a product of linguistic structure
Saussurean Theory
•Binary Oppositions (defining a unit of language against what it is not)
•SIGN—Signifier (Signifiant)/Signified (Signifié)
•Saussure stressed that the relationship between the signifier and the signified was entirely conventional,
completely arbitrary. Both terms are psychological in nature (sound-image and concept)
• Langue / Parole
•Collective language system and individual use of that system; homogeneous and heterogeneous
• Like competence & performance; base and superstructure; unconscious and conscious
•A speech community follows the same connections between a signifier and a signified
•Synchrony / Diachrony
•Contemporary state and historical dimension
•Paradigm / Syntagm
•Similarity / Contrast
•Selection / Combination
• Speech / Writing
• Speech guarantees subjectivity and presence (someone has to do the speaking)
• Writing is about absence, the absence of the speaker and what is signified by the written
signifiers.
• Derrida calls the privileging of speech and presence logocentrism
• Three dictums
•Meaning is arbitrary (Language isn’t a reflection of the world)
•Meaning is relational (paradigmatic-syntagmatic axis, 8.25 Geneva to Paris express)
• Language constitutes our world (terrorist / freedom fighter, seasons)
•Many of Saussure’s ideas were criticised in later times, and is not considered important today
•Controversial ending of Course: “Linguistics has as its unique and true object the language envisioned
in itself and for itself”

Implications on literary criticism

•Anti-humanist view
• Individual human agency underprivileged
•Neither human beings nor social phenomena have essences
•Sharp divergence from the Romantic notion of the author as the source of meaning
•Emphasis shifted from authorial intention to broader impersonal linguistic structures in
which the author’s text “participates
• Todorov, Greimas, reacted against Sartre’s existentialism for its undue focus on the human being

Michel Foucault’s This is Not a Pipe

• In this book, Foucault questions received notions of representation in art by engaging a number of
artworks by Belgian surrealist painter Réné Magritte.
• Foucault’s argument:
• In Modernity, people are falsely positioned within a system of seeing that links reality with
visual representation
• In saying that an image resembles reality, one assumes the ontological superiority of the latter
•Both Magritte and Foucault are in agreement with Ferdinand de Saussure in asserting the
arbitrariness of the sign.

Saussurean Theory—Implications
•Cut across literature or humanities to give objective account of cultural practices
• Literary work becomes text (play of component elements according to codes)
• Individual author / subject is a construct, dead
• The act of Reading (not author or even reader) central agency in criticism

Semiotics / Semiology
• Language must be studied in itself
•Charles Sanders Peirce and Saussure
•Saussure suggests that the study of language must be situated within the larger province of
semiology. i.e., Linguistics is a part of semiology
•Science of signs (what constitutes signs, what laws govern them)
Concepts
 •A word’s meaning derives entirely from its difference from other words in the sign system of language –
rain not brain or sprain or rail or roan or reign
•All signs are cultural constructs that have taken on their meaning through repeated, learned, collective
use
•Even when we try to define a sign, we are always forced to use another sign to translate it. The process
of communication is an unending chain of sign production, which Peirce dubbed ‘unlimited semiosis’
•wag (n) १. ठठोिलया, मसखरा, हंसोड
•wag (vti) १. िहलना, िहलाना, चलना, डोलना
•wage (n) १. मजदरी, वेतन
•wage (vt) १. िकराया करना, २. दांव पर लगना, होड बढना, ३. हाथ में लेना
•Charles Sanders Peirce introduces the distinctions of symbolic, iconic, and indexical signs.
• Iconic "resembles its signified" (drawing of a dog; map) but still mediated

Denotation and Connotation

•Concepts in Semantics
•Denotation is the first order of signification: the signifier is the image itself and the
signified the idea or concept—what it is a picture of.
•Connotation is a second-order signifying system that uses the first sign as its signifier
and attaches an additional meaning, another signified, to it.
•Barthes argues that connotation is the primary way in which the mass media
communicate ideological meaning.
•At the DENOTATIVE level
•A photograph of the movie star Marilyn Monroe.
•At a CONNOTATIVE level
•Marilyn Monroe's star qualities of glamour, sexuality, beauty
•Also her depression, drug-taking and untimely death
•At a MYTHIC level
• This sign represents the myth of Hollywood: the dream factory that produces glamour, but also
crushes the artistes—all with a view to profit.

Myth Criticism
Myth criticism: Influence
•Structuralism as a movement developed in the 1950s
•Challenged New Criticism
•Anticipated by Northrop Frye’s Myth Criticism (1940s-mid-60s)
•Other Myth Critics: Richard Chase, Leslie Fiedler, Daniel Hoffman, Philip Wheelwright

Myth Criticism
•Drew upon anthropological and psychological bases of myths, rituals & folktales to restore the spiritual
content to the alienated, fragmented world ruled by scientism, empiricism and technology.
•Regarded creation of myth (with its associations with magic, imagination, dreams…) as integral to
human thought
• Literature emerges out of a core of myth
• Literature is a “system” based on “recurrent patterns”
•Myth is a collective attempt of cultures to establish a meaningful context for human existence
• TS Eliot: The Modernist writer should employ the Mythical method because it gives “a shape and a
significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy that is contemporary history”

Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism (1957)

•Continued the formalist emphasis of New Criticism
• Insisted even more strongly that criticism should be a scientific, objective and systematic discipline
• Literary history is a repetitive and self-contained cycle (where basic symbolic myths recur: deluge
myth, trickster)

Structuralist Narratology
•A form of structuralism espoused by Vladimir Propp, Tzvetan Todorov, Roland Barthes, and Gerard
Genette that illustrates how a story's meaning develops from its overall structure (its langue) rather than
from each individual story's isolated theme.
• To ascertain a text's meaning, narratologists emphasize grammatical elements such as verb tenses and
the relationships and configurations of figures of speech within the story

Claude Levi-Strauss & Structuralist Anthropology

• Linguistics one of the key social sciences
•Based on the idea that people think in terms of binary opposites—high / low, inside / outside, life / death
•Every culture can be understood in terms of these oppositions
• Levi-Strauss' approach arose from the philosophy of Hegel who explains that in every situation there are
two opposing things and their resolution; he called these "thesis, antithesis, and synthesis”
• showed, for example, how opposing ideas would fight and also be resolved in the rules of marriage, in
mythology, and in ritual
Claude LeviStrauss
•Taught in Brazil
•Field-trips among peoples of the Amazon and examined Bororo myths
•Resented Sartre’s existentialism (which was humanist—the belief that human beings create their own
meanings and essence)
•Analyzed cultural phenomena including mythology, kinship and food preparation
•Applied the principles of langue and parole in his search for the fundamental mental structures of the
human mind (structures that form the "deep grammar" of society originate in the mind and operate in us
unconsciously )
Pioneer in Structuralism
• Structuralism entered French intellectual circles in the 1960s through the ethnographic work of Levi-
Strauss
• Applied the structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure to anthropology
• Levi-Strauss realised that “for the first time, a social science is able to formulate necessary
relationships”
• These “relationships” are recognised based on the following principles:
• Conscious laws may be reduced to their unconscious assumptions
• Every term gets its meaning from its binary opposites, or, all social facts are embedded in
relationships
• The concept of system made up of constituent parts organised according to rules
• Levi-Strauss gave importance to the Secondary Family in determining the identity of the Family or the
Individual
• The identity is determined by the relations of members with one another
• Just as the context became important in understanding the text
• Structuralism focuses not on individual texts, but on the relationships between them
• Similarly, Culture is not a set of disconnected rituals, beliefs, practices, art forms, etc, but is a kind of
language that generates meanings through its interrelations.

Tristes Tropiques
•Claude Levi-Strauss, in his book Tristes Tropiques, complained of the perennial popularity of “armchair
travel” books, lectures and films, containing scraps of hackneyed information interspersed among the
anecdotes of the trips. He concluded that fiction seemed to have been transformed into truths solely
by virtue of the fact that the author had travelled thousands of miles to write them. The popularity of
these works was because the readers and audiences were interested in the exotic, and
accuracy and truth were not at issue when it came to the exotic.

The Elementary Structures of Kinship (1949)

• Develops Marcel Mauss’ principle of reciprocity
•This means that a society maintains its stability through the exchange of gifts between groups
•Gifts have symbolic value — food, material goods and women become part of this symbolic
system
•Levi-Strauss was aware of how this symbolic system can be misused, and the book was
reviewed favourably by Simone de Beauvoir
•Levi-Strauss proposed an analogy between kinship systems and language, both
understood as systems of communication
•Propounded the controversial Alliance Theory — the study of relations between groups, families or
individuals through marriage (as against Descent theories)
•All societies have rules about who can marry whom
 •The society is divided into ‘possible partners’ and ‘prohibited partners’
•The Incest taboo is universal, and is the basis of all cultures
•Within these rules, marriage is a form of exchange, and represents reciprocity instead of
hostility
•Reciprocity is communication, integration, alliance
•Used the linguistic concept of Binary Oppositions, which he later applied to myths
•Later, he moved from studies of kinship systems to studies of mythology

Myth
• Myths are religious tales, social in nature, acted out in rituals
• Myths are a repository of information on culture, on social customs and behaviour
• Myth is a type of thought, a kind of symbolic language
•And it can be studied like language
• Myth is the language in which “primitive” men articulated various aspects of their existence and
negotiated with their role in the world
•In other words, myths of primitive societies revealed about those societies themselves
•These myths are all based on a deep grammar of all societies and cultures, and hence are similar
in some ways
•They reveal the structure of the human mind
•This means the “primitive” societies are not “primitive” after all, and have interrelationships
with modern societies and their cultures
• Roland Barthes paid tribute to Levi-Strauss by adapting the word in his book Mythologies (1957)
Myth

• Carl Jung
•Different from Levi-Strauss and Structuralists
•Jung did “Symbolic” study of myths, and sought meaning in the constituents of myth, rather
than in their relations
• Archetypal or Myth Criticism anticipated Levi Strauss’ Structuralism
•Also rooted in anthropology, started from Maud Bodkin’s book Archetypal Patterns in
Poetry (1934)
•Peaked in the 1940s and 50s with the work of Northrop Frye
•Analyses texts based on recurring myths or archetypes

Structural Anthropology (1958)

• The book inaugurated a school
• Culture is symbolic communication and should be analysed like novels, movies, sports, etc
• Understands Culture in terms of constituent elements and Binary Oppositions
•As against Interpretive anthropology
•As against the functionalist approach
• Influence of Emile Durkheim, Bronislaw Malinowski, Marcel Mauss, and Structural linguists like
Saussure and Jakobson

Myths
•Myths seem fantastic and arbitrary, yet myths from different cultures are similar. Hence he said there
must be universal laws that govern myths (and all human thought).
•Myths consist of (1) elements that oppose or contradict each other and (2) other elements that "mediate",
or resolve, those oppositions (such as Trickster / Raven / Coyote uniting Herbivores and Carnivores)
•Mythemes: the smallest component parts of a myth. By breaking up myths into mythemes, those
structures (mythemes) may be studied chronologically (diachronically) or synchronically/relationally

The Structural Study of Myth (1955)

• What is important is not what the myths are
•But what underlying rules govern them
•Every version of a myth is a parole; what is important is the langue
• The constituent part of a myth is called a “Mytheme”
•A Mytheme is a “bundle of relations”
•The meaning of the myth lies in these relations
•Explains using the Oedipus Myth
 • This laid the foundation of the Structural Study of Literature
•Myths are oral texts; literature written
The Savage Mind (1962)
• “The Savage Mind” refers to untamed human thought
•Represented by the Bricoleur who constructs things using whatever is available
• As against the Scientific Mind
•Represented by the Engineer who works according to a plan and designs solutions
Mythologiques (1964)
• The Raw and the Cooked (1964)— examines how the binary oppositions like 'raw' and 'cooked,' 'fresh'
and 'rotten,' 'moist' and 'parched,' and others “can serve a people as conceptual tools for the formation of
abstract notions and for combining these into propositions."
• From Honey to Ashes (1966)
• The Origin of Table Manners (1968)
• The Naked Man (1971)

Bricoleur and Engineer (The Savage Mind) Related to Poststructuralism

•B—works with hands in devious ways •E—true craftsman
•Puts pre-existing things together in new •Deals with projects in entirety, taking into account the
ways availability of materials and tools
•Makes do with whatever is at hand •Creates new tools and materials
•Savage Mind •Scientific Mind
•Bricolage is the characteristic of
mythological thought
• Levi-Strauss argued that the "savage
mind" had the same structures as the
"civilized" mind and that human
characteristics are the same
everywhere.
•Derrida extended this to all discourses

Bricolage: Levi-Strauss
• In The Savage Mind, structuralist anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss characterized two modes of
thought, the mythical and the scientific. Mythical thought is grounded in observation of the sensible
world, whereas scientific thought is grounded in the imperceptible (Lévi-Strauss, 1968). Lévi-Strauss
drew an analogy between mythical thought and bricolage, a French word with no precise English
equivalent but similar to our notion of tinkering, of dabbling. The bricoleur is a skillful handyman, a jack-
of-alltrades who uses convenient implements and ad hoc strategies to achieve his ends. Unlike the
engineer, the scientific thinker who strives to construct holistic, totalizing systems from the ground up,
the bricoleur performs his tasks from spare parts, from odds and ends.
• In his critique of Lévi-Strauss’s (1968) reliance on scientific thought as a production of universalism,
Jacques Derrida (1967/1980) showed that even the engineer is a bricoleur himself, a myth.
• In Levi-Strauss’s concept of bricolage, what is important is that signs already in existence are not used
for purposes that they were originally meant for. When a faucet breaks, we insert a cloth in it, so that it
does not leak. The cloth is not actually meant for stopping the leak. In using it for this purpose, we
transform it into a different object, by making it function in a different way altogether.
•Unlike us, the engineer would have taken into consideration the possibility that the tap might break off
from the sink and he would have had either a spare faucet for this eventuality or all the spanners and bolts
necessary to repair the tap.
•However, Levi Strauss tries to prove that the Savage Mind has the same features as the Scientific Mind.
•Mythology functions more like a bricoleur, whereas modern western science works more like an
engineer. In Levi-Strauss’s writings, the status of modern western science is ambivalent. On the one hand
he endorses scientific approaches to the material under study, on the other he suggests that modern
western science in contemporary societies has more or less the same status and function that mythology
had in primitive societies.

Bricolage: Derrida
•Derrida argues in “Structure, Sign and Play” that the opposition of bricolage to engineering is far more
troublesome than Levi-Strauss admits. In the first place it is simply a myth to suppose it is possible for
anyone “to construct the totality of his language, syntax and lexicon” or to be “the absolute origin of his
own discourse”. But it is precisely such control of theory and method Levi-Strauss attributes to the
engineer, which would seem a very strange attibution for a stucturalist to make.
•“The engineer is a myth produced by the bricoleur” because the bricoleur would not be as exciting and
inventive if the engineer were not so unimaginative and dreary. “As soon as we cease to believe in such
an engineer, and as soon as we admit that every finite discourse is bound by a certain bricolage, and that
the engineer and the scientist are also species of the bricoleurs, then the very idea of bricolage is menaced
and the difference in which it took on its meaning breaks down.
•From this, it is also clear how a binary opposition produces the myth of a privileged term by producing
the myth of an absolutely opposing term. In every case, the opposing term has absolutely none of the
qualities of the privileged term.
Controversy
• Levi-Strauss tried to explain all human history using conclusions drawn from his studies in
Amazon rainforest. Some of his conclusions were contrived and implausible.
• Barthes, in S/Z, critiqued the early Structuralist attempts to see all the stories of the world within
monolithic structures
• Derrida questioned the very concept of binary oppositions and Levi-Strauss’ nostalgic interest in
human wholeness
• The grand claims of Levi-Strauss’ structuralist ideas seem to point to endless repetition
• Structuralists like Levi-Strauss showed that meaning is reliant upon the dominant structures of
thought in the society. But didn’t explain why these structures exist or how they change over time.

Vladimir Propp (1895-1970)

• Russian narratologist
• Wrote a few decades before the advent of European Structuralism and had a highly formalist approach
• The Morphology of the Folktale (1928)
•Examined the grammar of human storytelling
•Propp looked at the underlying syntagmatic relationship between plot elements of folk tales:
•Identified 31 different plot functions which serve as “stable, constant elements in a
tale, independent of how and by whom they are fulfilled”
•7 character functions
A.J. Greimas (1917-1992)
• Greimas was a Lithuanian linguist and structural narratologist
• In Structural Semantics (1976), he brought together Saussure and Levi-Strauss to reinterpret Vladimir
Propp
• Sought to find the deep structure of narratives
•Developed a pattern based on the hero’s quest for freedom and the constraints of the existing
order
• The actantial model of narratives
•To analyse the action that takes place in a story
•At the core of every discourse, there is a human situation within which the actants – or
entities that take up roles in the narrative – function as Subject / Object, Sender / Receiver, or
Helper / Opponent

Sender Receiver

Subject Object

Helper Opponent

Tzvetan Todorov (1939-2017)

• Bulgarian-French historian and Structuralist critic who employed a very scientific, systematic approach
• He believed that every literary work is based on an “equilibrium” or a stable but not static relationship
between the members of the society. In the literary work, the equilibrium might be disturbed, then
restored, perhaps in a new way.
•Five stages of a narrative: Equilibrium, Disruption of the equilibrium, Realization that
the disruption has started, Attempt to repair the damage, Restoration of the equilibrium
 • Associated with the famous concept of the fantastic (incidents that seem to be
supernatural, which can be either Uncanny or Marvellous)

Gerard Genette (1930-2018)

• French Struturalist theorist
• Essay “Strcturalism and Literary Criticism”
•Adopted the theory of bricolage
•Intellectual bricolage means methods of one discipline can be applied to another
• Theory of narratology developed in the book Narrative Discourse: An Essay in
Method (1979)
•Uses examples from Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past
Roland Barthes
•Work embodies transition from structuralist to poststructuralist perspectives
•Certain works have a Marxist perspective
•Extended structural analysis and semiology to broad cultural phenomena
•Confronted the limits of structuralism
Works
•Early works derived inspiration from Saussure, Sartre, Brecht
•Writing Degree Zero (1953)
•Mythologies (1957)
•Structuralist works
•Elements of Semiology (1964)
• “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative” (1966)
• “Death of the Author” (1968)
•Poststructuralist works
•S/Z (analysis of Sarrasine, 1970)
• “From Work to Text”
• The Pleasure of the Text
Mythologies
• Ideological critique of products of mass bourgeois culture
• soap, advertisements, images of Rome…
• attempt to discover a “universal nature” behind this
• This is explained using the concept of “myth”
Barthes’ notion of “myth”
•Myth is a language, a mode of signification
•Reiterates Saussure’s view that semiology comprises three terms: signifier, signified and sign
• “Sign” is a relation
• The structure of myth repeats this tridimensional pattern (Myth is a second-order signifying system
illustrated by the example of the young Negro)

Orders of signification
•An idea Barthes adopted from Danish linguist Louis Hjelmslev
• First-order signification (linguistic level): the French are militaristic
•Second-order signification (mythological level): France is a great Empire, and all her sons, without any
colour discrimination, faithfully serve under her flag; the zeal shown by this negro in serving France
shows that the allegations against colonialism are all false)
•Democracy, freedom, American imperialism etc are all such myths, wrenched from their historical
contexts to mean and naturalize peace, world order and security
• The very principle of myth is “to transform history into nature”

Ideology and culture

• Ideology and culture, as kinds of propaganda, work best when they are not recognized as such because
they contribute to the construction of what people think of as “common sense”
• “The whole of France is steeped in this anonymous ideology: our press, our cinema, our theatre, our
popular literature, our ceremonies, our Justice, our diplomacy, our conversations, our remarks on the
weather, the crimes we try, the wedding we are moved by, the cooking we dream of, the clothes we wear,
everything, in our everyday life, contributes to the representation that the bourgeoisie makes for itself and
for us of the relationships between man and the world.”
“Do you know what's for lunch?
Panzani.”
This advertisement for pasta which appeared in a French magazine “offers us
three messages: a linguistic message, a coded iconic message, and a non-coded iconic message.”
• Linguistic message (the words)
•Denoted message: caption
•Connoted message: “Panzani” is Italian
• Literal message (non-coded iconic message)
•Symbolic message (coded iconic message)
• The half-open bag signifies return from market
• tomatoes and peppers as well as the colours yellow, red, green signify Italian city
• the collection of objects signifies a total culinary service
• the overall composition signifies the notion of a still life.

Death of the Author (1968)

•Deconstructionist, anti-humanist theory
•Author, symbolically male and end of all meaning, is now deposed.
• The Death of the Author is followed by the Birth of the reader; not just the reader, but the scriptor or
writer.
• The writer is an agent or medium created in language rather than existing before or after it, who mixes
writings, counters one with the others, never to rest on any one of them.
S/Z (study of Balzac's “Sarrasine”)
•Readerly (lisible) text (specific meanings—close meaning; conventions of 19th century Realism;
console the reader; fulfills expectations; pleasure) Writerly (scriptable) text (galaxy of signifiers—
encourages reader to be producer of meanings; conventions of Modernism; disturb the reader; resists
closure; presents plurality; jouissance)
The Pleasure of the Text
•Comfortable plaisir (pleasure) of conventional texts; comes from culture and does not break with it
• jouissance (bliss) of uncontrolled play of signifiers; imposes a state of loss, defamiliarizes and unsettles
the reader’s historical, cultural and psychological assumptions (a modernist or avant-garde text)
American Structuralists of 1960s
•Roman Jakobson
• Jonathan Culler (Structuralist Poetics), etc
• In the field of semiotics
•C. S. Peirce
•Charles Morris
•Noam Chomsky
Structuralist Architecture
•Structuralist architecture will have a great deal of complexity within a highly structured
framework. For example, a Structuralist design may consist of cell-like honeycomb shapes, intersecting
planes, cubed grids, or densely clustered spaces with connecting courtyards.