Structuralism — Complete Guide to Structuralist Literary Criticism
Structuralism emerged in mid-twentieth-century France as an attempt to bring scientific rigor to the humanities. Drawing on the structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure, it sought to uncover the hidden systems that make meaning possible. In literary criticism, structuralism treats individual works as instances of larger structures — narrative patterns, mythic archetypes, linguistic codes. This guide explains the Saussurean foundation, key concepts, major figures, and the legacy of structuralist criticism.
The Saussurean Foundation
Ferdinand de Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics (1916, compiled from lecture notes) revolutionized linguistics by arguing that language is a system of differences. The word dog does not mean what it does because it points to a real dog. It means what it does because it is not cat, not log, not god. Meaning arises from relations within the system, not from reference to the world.
Langue and Parole
Saussure distinguished between langue — the abstract system of a language, the set of rules that makes speech possible — and parole — individual utterances, the actual things people say. This distinction is crucial for structuralist criticism. Treating a novel as parole means reading it as an instance of the larger system — the structures of narrative, genre, and myth that make it intelligible. The structuralist critic is interested not in what makes this novel unique but in what makes it a novel — the conventions and codes it shares with other novels.
Signifier and Signified
The sign has two parts: the signifier (the sound or written mark) and the signified (the concept). The relationship between them is arbitrary. There is no natural connection between the word tree and the concept of a tree. This arbitrariness is crucial — it means meaning is conventional, not natural. Different languages carve up the world differently. What structuralism reveals is that these differences are systematic — each language is a system of differences, not a collection of labels for pre-existing concepts.
Structuralist Analysis in Practice
Narrative Structures
Claude Lévi-Strauss analyzed myths by breaking them into minimal units — mythemes — and examining how they combine. He showed that myths from different cultures share underlying structures — they are transformations of each other. Vladimir Propp, in Morphology of the Folktale (1928), identified thirty-one narrative functions in Russian folktales, showing that all the tales follow the same structural pattern.
Roland Barthes’s S/Z (1970) is a meticulous structuralist reading of Balzac’s story “Sarrasine.” Barthes broke the story into 561 lexias (brief reading units) and analyzed them through five codes — the hermeneutic code of enigma and solution, the proairetic code of action and consequence, the symbolic code of thematic patterns, the semic code of connotation, and the referential code of cultural knowledge. The result is a demonstration of how meaning is produced by the interaction of codes.
Binary Oppositions
Structuralists argue that human thought organizes the world into binary oppositions: nature/culture, raw/cooked, male/female, life/death. Myths and literary texts work through these oppositions, mediating contradictions and constructing meaning. Lévi-Strauss’s The Raw and the Cooked (1964) showed how South American myths use the opposition between raw and cooked food to think about the transition from nature to culture.
A structuralist reading identifies the key oppositions in a text and shows how they are resolved or held in tension. This method has been extended beyond literature to analyze film, fashion, and cultural practices.
Deep Structures and Surface Structures
Structuralism distinguishes between deep structures — the underlying systems that generate meaning — and surface structures — the particular forms those systems take in individual texts. A structuralist analysis of a detective novel, for example, would focus not on the specific plot of a particular mystery but on the deep structure that organizes all detective fiction: the crime, the investigation, the solution. This deep structure generates the surface variations that appear in different novels. The structuralist claim is that these deep structures are universal or near-universal features of human cognition and culture.
Key Figures
Roland Barthes (1915–1980)
Barthes moved from structuralist analysis to post-structuralist critique over his career. His early work, including Mythologies (1957) and S/Z, is exemplary structuralist analysis. Mythologies analyzed the “mythologies” of everyday life — wrestling, soap, wine, the Citroën DS — as signifying systems that naturalize bourgeois ideology. Barthes showed that apparently innocent cultural phenomena are in fact constructed and political.
Gérard Genette (1930–2018)
Genette developed a systematic vocabulary for analyzing narrative in Narrative Discourse (1972). His concepts of narrative voice (heterodiegetic, homodiegetic, autodiegetic), focalization (zero, internal, external), and narrative levels (extradiegetic, intradiegetic, metadiegetic) remain essential tools for analyzing how stories are told. For a detailed treatment of these concepts, see our narratology guide.
Tzvetan Todorov (1939–2017)
Todorov coined the term narratology. His Grammaire du Décaméron (1969) attempted to construct a grammar of narrative akin to the grammar of a sentence. Todorov’s The Fantastic (1970) analyzed the fantastic as a genre defined by hesitation between the natural and the supernatural — a structural definition that remains influential.
Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908–2009)
Lévi-Strauss applied structuralist methods to anthropology, analyzing kinship systems, myths, and cultural practices as structures of signification. His four-volume Mythologiques (1964–1971) showed that myths from across the Americas could be understood as systematic transformations of each other, governed by a logic of binary oppositions. Lévi-Strauss’s work demonstrated that structuralism could be applied not only to texts but to all forms of cultural production.
Structuralism’s Contribution
Structuralism gave literary criticism a rigorous vocabulary and a set of analytic tools. It showed that literature is not purely individual expression but participation in shared systems. It also opened the way for narratology — the systematic study of narrative structures — which remains a vital field.
For the relationship between structuralism and later developments, see our post-structuralism guide, which explains how critics challenged and transformed structuralist assumptions.
The Semiotic Extension
Structuralism’s insights extended beyond literature to create the field of semiotics — the study of sign systems. Semioticians analyze how meaning is produced in any cultural phenomenon: fashion (what does a particular style of dress signify?), food (how does a meal tell a story?), architecture (what does a building say about power?). This semiotic approach, pioneered by Barthes and later developed by Umberto Eco, shows that structuralist methods are applicable not just to literary texts but to the entire fabric of cultural life.
Eco’s A Theory of Semiotics (1976) and The Role of the Reader (1979) extended structuralist and semiotic analysis to a wide range of cultural phenomena, from architecture to comic books. Eco was also a novelist whose The Name of the Rose (1980) is itself a semiotic mystery — a novel about signs, interpretation, and the limits of meaning. The semiotic tradition continues to influence media studies, cultural studies, and the analysis of digital culture.
Critiques
Critics argue that structuralism is reductive, that it flattens the particularity of individual works into instances of general patterns. It also struggles to account for historical change and political power — questions that later movements like new historicism and postcolonial criticism addressed. Post-structuralists argued that the systems structuralism identified are never closed or stable — they contain points of instability that structuralism cannot explain.
Structuralism and Digital Humanities
Structuralist methods have found a new application in the digital humanities. The computational analysis of large text corpora, the identification of patterns across thousands of works, the mapping of narrative structures — these techniques are deeply indebted to structuralism’s emphasis on systematic analysis. The digital humanities extend structuralism’s project of uncovering the hidden structures that organize cultural production, using computational tools to detect patterns that would be invisible to human readers working with individual texts. This convergence of structuralism and computation suggests that structuralist methods, despite the critiques they have received, remain relevant and productive.
FAQ
What is the difference between structuralism and formalism? Both focus on the internal structures of texts, but structuralism is broader. Formalism is specifically concerned with literary language and literariness. Structuralism applies the methods of linguistics to all cultural phenomena — literature, myth, fashion, food, film.
Is structuralism still used in literary criticism? Yes, especially in narratology and genre studies. Many critics use structuralist tools without identifying as structuralists. The analysis of binary oppositions remains a common technique.
How do I write a structuralist analysis? Identify the underlying structures that organize the text — binary oppositions, narrative functions, recurring patterns. Show how individual elements derive meaning from their position within the system. Focus on the system, not the individual work.
What is the relationship between structuralism and semiotics? Semiotics (the study of signs) is the broader field. Structuralism is a specific approach within semiotics that emphasizes the systematic nature of signs. Barthes’s Mythologies is both structuralist and semiotic.
Can structuralism be applied to non-literary texts? Yes. Structuralism has been applied to film, television, advertising, architecture, and cultural practices. Any system of signs can be analyzed structurally.
What is a mytheme? A minimal unit of myth, analogous to a phoneme in linguistics. Lévi-Strauss analyzed myths by breaking them into mythemes and studying how they combine to produce meaning.
What are Propp’s thirty-one functions? Vladimir Propp identified thirty-one narrative functions that appear in Russian folktales, always in the same sequence. These functions describe the basic actions that move the plot forward, from “initial situation” to “wedding.”