01 Tuesday Jan 18

Andrew Bretton, with notes for 1/18/11

Having shown up to class on Tuesday the 18th, many students may have been lead to think they had shown up for an 'Intro to Linguistics' course; I would have been similarly mislead if not for the fact I actually am taking such a course this semester. The reason for the abrupt presence of linguistic studies is justified, however, in that such studies played a crucial part in the development of structuralism, a form of literary analysis that looks at the grammatical conventions and social impacts of a text instead of just at the message itself. To illustrate this, Professor Mathur talked about Ferdinand de Saussure, a linguist who held that in order for one to understand something, we relate it to other things that have similarities to it, or fit into the same category. This view implies that we must look at more than a subject of analysis in order to understand it fully, and this view is a, if not the, core value in structuralism.

In addition to this, he held that language itself constitutes reality; prior to Saussure’s research, it was held that language was the product of the world around us. Saussure, however, argued that language “is” the world around us, and so the relationship is reversed. In short, as Saussure looked at the overall structure of language instead of the particular aspects of it, so did structuralists begin looking at literature in the same way. Tying into this point, our professor introduced the concepts of langue and paroles, the former meaning any given way of speaking and the latter being the individual act or utterance through it. In structuralism, a langue would involve narrative structure, genre conventions and intertextual connections, whereas a parole would be a poem or novel in which such things are portrayed. For a structuralist, paroles are irrelevant; understanding the langue is key.

One class exercise involved looking at images like the American flag; here, we were asked to state what words came to mind from seeing it, and other words that related to it in similarity as well as opposition. Freedom, for example, tied into slavery, imperialism and power on one axis of concepts. This exercise showed us that structuralist practice involves looking at all words, letters and pictures as signs, and that these signs indicate key cultural meanings and relations.

Another critical part of structuralism is the idea of binary oppositions, and we got to see them first hand as well. Binary opposites, or dyads, are two conflicting ideas that are evident in a literary work; in W.B. Yeats’ Sailing to Byzantium, we saw such opposites as life and death, sensuality and intellect, and commendation and neglect. The purpose of this was to identify the opposites and their relation to the text, and determine if they indicated a positive or negative hierarchy (where binaries of one spectrum took precedence over the others); in the case of the poem, the hierarchy was positive in that the author is embracing age and the ultimate end with acceptance.

In conclusion, structuralism means looking at the structure of a work, its time period, and its conventions and discovering many truths about the work as opposed to just one.

--Gettodachoppaaa 05:34, 20 January 2011 (UTC)