I just finished reading Selden's take on structuralism, and am trying to
digest the new information... what I'm confused (or curious?) about is how
much of this information, from Tyson, Saussure, Levi-Strauss (isn't he the
guy who invented blue jeans? :p), and Selden we are supposed to
incorporate into our working with paper. Should we begin our
analysis by using Levi-Strauss's diagram with the synchronic and
diachronic spreadsheet chart to help us find the patterns? Should
each of those entries be representative of a binary opposition? In
the Part I of our paper, how much of the linguistic terminology (i.e. Saussure) and how many of the numerous examples Tyson gave of people who
have used structuralism (i.e. the mythos of winter/summer, etc etc etc) is
necessary?
I think I feel like I've done *so much* reading on Structuralism that I'm
not sure how to pare it down for a short essay. then again, maybe
I'm just having one of those weeks ;)
~stu
Hi
Student,
Your point is well-taken. That sense of (initial) confusion comes with
every new scholar's first journey into the territory of literary theory.
The field did not develop in a neat and orderly fashion. Scholars in
several nations, sometimes working decades apart but responding to the same
basic insights, created a series of "Structuralisms" in the early Twentieth
Century (Saussure in linguistics, Levi-Strauss in anthropology, Propp in
narratology, etc.). After New Criticism's loss of control of
"critical orthodoxy" (remember their emphasis on literature as a
secular "faith" and the critic as its priest?), the Dissenters
sprang up on every side, starting with a resurgence of new Anglo-European Structuralists
like Todorov, Greimas, and Culler. As is usual
when Dissent rears its ugly head, the Dissenters failed to agree upon their
principals, often for very good reasons. So what you have in the case of
the Structuralists is the invention of "Structuralisms" rather than
a new orthodoxy, though I admit I presented it in something of that light in
at least one web page (something about "a grand theory that tries to
Explain Everything"). We have basic principles and a way to apply
them drawn from the first generation of Structuralism (Saussure,
Levi-Strauss), and we have further applications of Structuralist methods in
the late-Twentieth-Century Structuralists summarized by Tyson and demonstrated
by Selden. In the "Working With" assignment, we are trying to synthesize
the best of their thinking into a useable compound of theory and method that
works for you. You cannot ignore the basic founding principles, but when
applying them you need to choose the methods that seem most sensible and
defensible. The same thing will happen when we hit Deconstruction(s) (a very "Decon" use of parens), and Feminisms (no
need for parens there!), and Reader-Response Theorists, and New Historicists
and Cultural Critics. Your basic description of your plan for how to
apply the method to Hemingway's story sounded good, but Part One will
require some nice judgment to summarize what we have read.
"Gah!,"
I hear you cry. "How am I to deal with multiple 'Structuralisms' in
only a page or two, even single-spaced, without descending to the use of teeny-tiny
type fonts that will make Arnie blind?" Here's the trick: describe
these various articulations of Structuralist theory in terms of what they all
tend to share in common. So as a start, you could name some things that
strikingly differentiate all of them from the New Critics, in particular, and
you could name some things they share in common with each other, as a result.
One big difference, humongous, if I can get MS-Word not to
"red-squiggle" that nonce word, is the difference between the
scientific Structuralists who (like Levi-Strauss and Saussure) work with very, very big
data sets that enable them to claim scientific precision for their conclusions
(on the one hand), and literary Structuralists like Culler and Tyson and Selden, who
work with single works to discover the "language-like" rules that make
their deep structures work (noun vs. anti-noun and verb vs. anti-verb
binaries, mostly). The latter group is the one you're most likely to be joining
unless you plan to unleash your PC on the entire corpus of In Our Time to
search for Levi-Strauss "mythemes" that tell "the fundamental myth" Hemingway
is telling us there, and finish it between
now and Thursday. Please don't try that!
Does
that help? I could go further, but doing that
"meta-analysis" of the various Structuralisms is part of the fun.
Literary critics tend to operate somewhat like farmers, who solve every
problem that comes their way by re-imagining uses for the tools and materials
they have on hand, and something like blue jays or magpies, attracted to bright
shiny theories in other disciplines (like Linguistics or Anthropology or
Political Science or Psychology) that they steal and bring back to their
academic nests in order to stack them in dazzling arrays that other critics
will envy and emulate and steal from, themselves. Sometimes we get
honest advantages from the process, and other times we look back on it
and think "what were we smoking?" (Sometimes
literally--Structuralism was the heady product of the late '60s and '70s, and
all that seeking after cosmic structures and the hidden codes in the universe
goes well with gurus and sitar music and bell-bottom pants.)
Basically, Part One asks you to choose which tools you will use to take apart
the apparatus known as "A Very Short Story" and it asks you to tell
the reader from whence you got those tools, what their use presupposes about
the way deep structures make literary works function for their readers, and what end or goal your
interpretation must reach if it is to succeed. Part Two applies your
personalized Structuralism to the story. I can see reasons why some
students might want to try Part Two first, just to make sure they have a
Structuralist method that produces insightful results, and then write Part One
to explain the theory and methods in general. Be sure to let me know if
you want further assistance. This is a tough theory and method to
master, even given two weeks to do it.
--Arnie