Based on Cytical Theory Today)

1. By: Olga Unal
ELIT 500 SEMINAR
Asst.Prof. Dr. Evrim DoğanAdanur
TR 13:30am-16:20pm

2.  The meaning of the he word structure
 Structural linguistics
 Structural anthropology
 Semiotics
 Structuralism and literature
 The structure of genres
 The structure of narrative (narratology)
 The structure of literary interpretation

3.  the word structure do not necessarily imply
structuralist activity
 you are engaged in structuralist activity if you
examine the structure of a large number of short
stories to discover the underlying principles that
govern their composition
 You are also engaged in structuralist activity if
you describe the structure of a single literary
work to discover how its composition
demonstrates the underlying principles of a
given structural system.

4.  Structuralism sees itself as a human science
whose effort is to understand, in a systematic
way, the fundamental structures that underlie all
human experience and, therefore, all human
behaviour and production.
Structuralism - a method of systematizing
human experience that is used in many different
fields of study: for example, linguistics,
anthropology, sociology, psychology, and
literary studies.

5. Surface phenomena
(the visible world)
Wholeness
(a unit)
Transformation
(not static)
Self-regulation
Structure

6. Ferdinand de Saussure
1857 - 1913
De Saussure was not satisfied
with the historical
comparison of language. He
stated that such comparison
only answered where a
language comes from, but not
what language is.

7. STRUCTURAL
LINGUISTICS
• Language is not a
collection of individual
words with individual
histories but a
structural system of
relationships among
words as they are used
at a given point in time,
or synchronically.
Ferdinand de Saussure
1913 - 1915

8. Langue
The abstract system
Parole
Actual speech
Main tenets

9.  Components of a
structure interact!!!
Human mind perceives
difference most
readily in terms of
opposites, which
structuralists call
binary oppositions

10. Signified Signifier
Physical dimension of language
Sign
Car
/ka:r/

11.  Seeks the underlying common
denominators, the structures, that link
all human beings regardless of the
differences among the surface
phenomena of the cultures to which
they belong.
 Diverse forms of entertainment are
studied (food preparation and serving
rituals, religious rites, games, literary
and non-literary texts).
 Despite the very different ritual forms
in which different cultures express
important aspects of community life, it
seems that all human cultures have
some codified processCLAUDE
LÉVI-STRAUSS

12. Found that the enormous
number of myths from
various cultures reduces
itself to a rather limited
number of what he called
mythemes, the fundamental
units of myths.
Conducted cross-cultural
analysis of kinship, myths
and religion in an attempt to
understand the fundamental
structure of human
cognition
Consequently, cultural
phenomena are not identical
but they are the products of
an underlying universal
pattern of thought.
uncover this pattern.
Mythologiques

13.  Studies a sign system is a
linguistic or nonlinguistic object
or behavior that can be
analyzed as if it were a
specialized language.
 Roland Barthes (analyzed
professional wrestling and
striptise).
 Semiotics recognizes
language as the most
fundamental and important
sign system.

14. Signified Signifier
Physical dimension of language
Sign
Car
/ka:r/
Objects
Gestures
Activities
Sounds
Images

15. Northrop Frye
Romance
Summer
Ideal world
Tragedy
Autumn
Move from the ideal w.to
the real w.
Comedy
Spring
Move from the real w.to
the ideal w.
Irony/Satire
Winter
Real world
Genres

16. theory of modes
based on the protagonist’s power
to take action as it compares to the power
of other men and to the power
of their environment
(nature and/or society)
archetypal criticism
Deals with archetype
refers to any recurring image,
character type, plot
formula, or pattern of action
(specific to a particular genre).
The structure of a genre
remains the same!!!!
Methods
of classification
of genres

17. Frye’s theory of modes

18. Robert Scholes offers a different version of Frye’s modes.
He eliminats the nonliterary mode of myth and inserts a new category
Robert Scholes’s theory of modes

19. Important!!!
Different structuralists can have different ways of
categorizing the same material!!!
This kind of analysis
 Relationships among literary texts!!!
What governs literature as a whole???
Robert Scholes
Born: May 19, 1929 (age 85),

20. Narratology examine in minute detail the inner “workings” of
literary texts in order to discover the fundamental structural units
(such as units of narrative progression) or functions (such as
character functions) that govern texts’ narrative operations.
Greimas observes that we perceive
every entity as having two aspects: its opposite (the opposite of love is hate)
and its negation (the negation of love is the absence of love).

21. Greimas
suggests the following
structures
1. Contractual structures
2. Performative structures
3. Disjunctive structures
concludes that the novelist
creates in which all conflicts
reduce to the fundamental
symbolic conflict between life
and death.

22. Todorov
draws an analogy between the
structural units of narrative— such as
elements of characterization and plot—
and the structural units of language

23. Genette begins by differentiating among three levels
of narrative
Story
Narrative
Narration
Observes that story, narrative, and narration interact
by means of
 Tense (Order, Duration, Frequency)
 Mood (Distance, Perspective) and
Voice (of the narrator)
NARRATOLOGY
what does this pattern imply about human
experience
or the structures of human consciousness?

24. Jonathan Culler
” the system of rules and codes is a structural system that
governs both the writing and interpretation of literary texts .
The convention of distance and impersonality
an assumption we make as soon as we see that we are reading
a literary work
Naturalization
transformation of strange literary forms
The rule of significance
the assumption that the literary work expresses a significant
attitude about some important problem, and so we pay attention to what
it says
The rule of metaphorical coherence
requirement that the two components of a metaphor have a consistent
relationship within the context of the work.
The rule of thematic unity
our expectation that the literary work unified theme, or main point

25. How should the text be classified in terms of its genre?
Analyze the text’s narrative operations. Can you speculate
about the relationship between the text’s grammar and
the culture from which the text emerged?
What rules or codes of interpretation must be internalized
in order to “make sense” of the text?
What are the semiotics of a given category of cultural
phenomena, or “texts,” In other words,
analyze the nonverbal messages sent by the “texts”