Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Literature

Extract

Structuralism is the name given to a variety of analytic methods and practices that, in the first half of the twentieth century, dominated studies in linguistics, anthropology, literary theory, and semiology. According to structuralist theory, human knowledge and practice is constituted by structural relations between terms in a system governed by codes that assign meaning to each term. The figure most often associated with origins of structuralism is Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857 – 1913), whose Course in General Linguistics ( 1916 ) advanced the then novel idea that language is a system that is present in its entirety in each individual utterance. Linguistics after Saussure shifted from the study of utterances to the study of the rules that give rise to utterances. The idea that language use is governed by a linguistic system and that meaning is a function of difference within the system itself has had a profound effect on literary and cultural theory. Saussure proposed a new way of looking at language. The linguists of his day looked at language referentially and historically, and were concerned primarily with the relations between words and things and with the history of linguistic development. A predominant pursuit for these linguists was to determine how most modern European languages could be traced back to a single, long-vanished, Indo-European source language. ... log in or subscribe to read full text