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

Structuralism (Cytical Theory Today)

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Page 1: Structuralism (Cytical Theory Today)

By: Olga UnalELIT 500 SEMINARAsst.Prof. Dr. Evrim Doğan AdanurTR 13:30am-16:20pm

Page 2: Structuralism (Cytical Theory Today)

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

Page 3: Structuralism (Cytical Theory Today)

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.

Page 4: Structuralism (Cytical Theory Today)

Structuralism sees itself as a human sciencewhose 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.

Page 5: Structuralism (Cytical Theory Today)

Surface phenomena

(the visible world)

Wholeness

(a unit)

Transformation

(not static)Self-regulation

Structure

Page 7: Structuralism (Cytical Theory Today)

STRUCTURALLINGUISTICS

• 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

Page 8: Structuralism (Cytical Theory Today)

Langue

The abstract system

Parole

Actual speech

Main tenets

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Components of a structure interact!!!Human mind perceives difference mostreadily in terms of opposites, which structuralists call binary oppositions

Page 10: Structuralism (Cytical Theory Today)

Signified Signifier

Physical dimension of language

Sign

Car

/ka:r/

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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

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Found that the enormousnumber 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

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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.

Page 14: Structuralism (Cytical Theory Today)

Signified Signifier

Physical dimension of language

Sign

Car

/ka:r/

ObjectsGesturesActivitiesSounds Images

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Northrop Frye

Romance

Summer

Ideal world

Tragedy

Autumn

Move from the ideal w.tothe real w.

Comedy

Spring

Move from the real w.tothe ideal w.

Irony/Satire

Winter

Real world

Genres

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theory of modesbased 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 criticismDeals with archetyperefers to any recurring image, character type, plotformula, or pattern of action(specific to a particular genre). The structure of a genre remains the same!!!!

Methods of classification

of genres

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Frye’s theory of modes

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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

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Important!!!Different structuralists can have different ways ofcategorizing the same material!!!

This kind of analysis Relationships among literary texts!!!What governs literature as a whole???

Robert ScholesBorn: May 19, 1929 (age 85),

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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 perceiveevery 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).

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Greimassuggests the following structures 1. Contractual structures2. Performative structures3. Disjunctive structures

concludes that the novelist creates in which all conflicts reduce to the fundamental symbolic conflict between life and death.

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Todorov

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

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Genette begins by differentiating among three levels of narrativeStoryNarrativeNarration

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 experienceor the structures of human consciousness?

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Jonathan Culler

” the system of rules and codes is a structural system thatgoverns 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 workNaturalizationtransformation of strange literary formsThe 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 saysThe rule of metaphorical coherencerequirement 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

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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 andthe 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”