Structuralism: The Science of Literary Systems

Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913) is called the Father of Structuralism. His major work is Course in General Linguistics (Cours de linguistique générale), published posthumously in 1916 by his students Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye from lecture notes. It established that language is a structured system of signs and relationships, not a collection of words.

According to Saussure, a sign is the basic unit of language — the inseparable union of two components: the Signifier (the sound-image or written form, e.g., the letters/sounds of the word 'rose') and the Signified (the mental concept or idea the signifier evokes, e.g., the idea of a rose). The sign is not a word attached to a thing; it is a psychological entity joining a concept to a sound-image.

Saussure's principle of the arbitrary nature of the sign means there is no natural, logical, or motivated connection between a signifier and its signified. The same concept (a tree) is called 'tree' in English, 'arbre' in French, 'Baum' in German, and 'গাছ' in Bengali. Since different languages use entirely different signifiers for the same signified, the link must be arbitrary — a matter of social convention, not nature.

Langue is the abstract, collective system of language — the grammar, vocabulary, and rules of English as shared by all English speakers. It exists in the collective mind of the speech community. Parole is the individual, concrete act of speaking — any specific utterance like this sentence. Example: The rules of chess = langue; one particular game played between two players = parole. Structuralism studies langue (the system) not parole (individual use).

Synchronic linguistics studies a language as a complete, functioning system at one specific point in time — how it works 'now', regardless of its history. Diachronic linguistics studies how a language changes and evolves historically over time (e.g., tracing 'father' from Proto-Indo-European through Latin 'pater' to Modern English). Structuralism focuses on synchronic analysis; pre-Saussurean philology was mainly diachronic.

The syntagmatic axis is the horizontal chain of combination — how linguistic units are sequenced together to form phrases, sentences (e.g., 'The + cat + sat + on + the + mat'). The paradigmatic axis is the vertical set of substitution — the set of other units that could replace a given unit at a specific position (e.g., 'cat' could be replaced by 'dog', 'rat', 'child'). Jakobson linked syntagmatic to Metonymy and paradigmatic to Metaphor.

Vladimir Propp identified 31 narrative functions (also called narratemes) in Morphology of the Folktale (1928), based on his analysis of 100 Russian folk tales. These functions are invariant units of action that always appear in the same sequential order, though not all 31 need appear in every tale. The functions are constant across tales; what varies is who performs them and how.

Propp's 7 character roles (spheres of action) are: (1) The Villain — creates conflict; (2) The Donor — tests the hero and provides a magical agent; (3) The Helper — assists the hero; (4) The Princess (Sought-for Person) — the goal of the quest; (5) The Dispatcher — sends the hero on the quest; (6) The Hero — the protagonist who seeks and restores order; (7) The False Hero — falsely claims the hero's reward.

Tzvetan Todorov (1939–2017) coined the term 'narratology' in his 1969 work Grammaire du Décaméron (Grammar of the Decameron). He defined it as the systematic, scientific study of narrative structure. Todorov also proposed the fundamental structural formula for all narrative: initial Equilibrium → Disruption/Disequilibrium → New Equilibrium.

A.J. Greimas' Actantial Model (Structural Semantics, 1966) proposes 6 actants arranged in 3 pairs: Subject ↔ Object (the desire/quest axis — who wants what); Sender ↔ Receiver (the communication/contract axis — who initiates the quest and who benefits); Helper ↔ Opponent (the power/conflict axis — who aids and who hinders the Subject). An actant is a narrative function, not necessarily a single character.

Jakobson's six functions (each oriented towards one element of communication) are: Referential (context), Emotive (addresser), Conative (addressee), Phatic (contact), Metalingual (code), and Poetic (message). The Poetic Function — oriented towards the message itself — is the most important for literary theory. When language draws attention to its own form, texture, and structure rather than its referent, the poetic function dominates. It is the defining characteristic of literary language.

The Poetic Function (Roman Jakobson, 'Linguistics and Poetics', 1960) is the function of language oriented towards the message itself — its form, sound, rhythm, and structure. It is the dominant function in literary language: poetry, for instance, draws attention to how things are said rather than merely what is said. Jakobson's famous example: 'I like Ike' — the alliteration and rhythm enact the poetic function independent of meaning.

'The Death of the Author' is a 1967 essay by Roland Barthes. It argues that once a text is produced, the author's biographical intentions are irrelevant to its meaning. Meaning is not a message transmitted from an author to a passive reader — it is produced by the reader in the act of reading. Every text is a 'tissue of quotations' drawn from countless cultural sources, not an expression of a single originating consciousness. Barthes declared: 'The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.'

In S/Z (1970), Barthes identified five codes through which any narrative operates: (1) Hermeneutic Code (HER) — narrative enigma and suspense; (2) Proairetic Code (ACT) — sequences of actions and their logical consequences; (3) Semantic Code (SEM) — connotations attached to persons, places, and objects; (4) Symbolic Code (SYM) — deep binary oppositions structuring meaning; (5) Cultural/Referential Code (REF) — references to bodies of cultural knowledge outside the text.

In S/Z (1970), Barthes distinguished: Readerly (lisible) texts — closed, comfortable narratives that offer a fixed, singular meaning and position the reader as passive consumer (classic realist novels). Writerly (scriptible) texts — open, plural, resistant to closure, demanding the reader's active participation in producing meaning (modernist and experimental texts). Barthes valued writerly texts for their liberation of interpretation from authorial authority.

Claude Lévi-Strauss applied Saussurean linguistics to anthropology in Structural Anthropology (1958). He argued that myths across different cultures, while narratively diverse, share a common underlying structure: they work through binary oppositions (nature/culture, raw/cooked, life/death) to 'think through' fundamental human contradictions. He broke myths into the smallest meaningful units — mythemes — and showed their meaning emerged from structural relationships. His analysis of the Oedipus myth and The Raw and the Cooked (1964) demonstrate this method.

A binary opposition is a pair of mutually exclusive, hierarchically arranged terms through which meaning is structured in language, literature, and culture. Structuralists (following Saussure's principle that meaning comes from difference) found that human thought naturally organises itself through such pairs. Examples: Nature/Culture (fundamental to Lévi-Strauss); Raw/Cooked (The Raw and the Cooked, 1964); Good/Evil (moral binaries in literature); Male/Female; Presence/Absence; Speech/Writing (later deconstructed by Derrida).

Mythemes are the smallest meaningful constituent units of myth, analogous to phonemes (the smallest sound units) in Saussurean linguistics. Lévi-Strauss argued that to analyse a myth structurally, one must break it down into its mythemes — minimal narrative units — and then arrange them in bundles to reveal their structural relationships. The meaning of a myth lies not in the individual mythemes but in their structural organisation into binary oppositions.

In Mythologies (1957), Barthes defines myth not as ancient stories but as a mode of signification — a second-order semiological system. A myth takes an already existing sign (with its own signifier and signified) and uses the whole sign as a new signifier for a second, ideological signified. Myth naturalises ideology: it presents historically contingent, politically constructed ideas as natural, eternal, and self-evident. A cover photograph of a Black soldier saluting the French flag (Barthes' own example) becomes a myth of French imperialism — the historical and political are erased, leaving only 'France is a great empire.'

Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye, both students of Saussure, compiled Course in General Linguistics (1916) after Saussure's death in 1913 from three sets of student lecture notes. Saussure himself never published these ideas. This matters because scholars debate how accurately the text represents Saussure's actual views — the text is a reconstruction, not a direct authorial statement. Later discoveries of Saussure's own manuscripts (including the 'Ecrits de linguistique générale', 2002) have revealed important nuances absent from the Cours.

Gérard Genette (1930–2018) developed the most systematic framework for narratological analysis in Narrative Discourse (Figures III, 1972). He analysed narrative along five dimensions: Order (analepsis = flashback; prolepsis = flash-forward), Duration (how much narrative time is spent on story time — scene, summary, ellipsis, pause), Frequency (singulative/repetitive/iterative narration), Mood/Focalization (who sees — zero, internal, external focalization), and Voice (who narrates — homo/heterodiegetic narrator). His terminology remains the standard vocabulary of contemporary narratology.