STRUCTURALISM is, as the name suggests, a theory focused upon the structure of human expressions. It is a complex intellectual movement that first established its importance in France in the 1950s and 1960s and was by no means confined to the study of literary works. Like the New Criticism, structuralism aims at comprehensiveness of description, and many critics would insist that the two are complementary and not separate. A distinction is that the New Criticism is at its best in dealing with smaller units of literature, whereas Structuralism is at its best in the analysis of narratives and therefore longer units such as novels, myths, and stories. Structuralists worked their particular reading strategy on everything from mythology to linguistics to anthropology. Indeed, French critic Roland Barthes went so far as to venture Structuralist readings of fashion magazines and wrestling matches. So long as the activity or work was generated by humans, so the assumption went, it could be decoded.

The foundations of structuralism are diverse. Formulated in large part on the noted Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure’s (1857-1913) theory of language as based on a system of differences rather than on resemblances or similarities. In his influential Course in General Linguistics (1915), Saussure proposed an arresting new way to understand language. It was, he argued, an entirely arbitrary system: all human activity is constructed, not natural or essential. There was no reason why any combination of letters or sounds could not represent any given thing, so long as the difference between one word and another was clearly given. In other words, language is a construct, a system based on the recognition of difference.

It was Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics that first comprehensively systematized the study of language, analyzing words as arbitrary linguistic signs and could, therefore, be understood only within a system. Rather than exploring the nature of mental concepts, the method defined ideas in terms of the language they are expressed in. Much of the power of the approach is derived from the method of analyzing by division: the Saussurean dichotomies or binary oppositions. The most relevant to literary criticism are

1. language as abstract system (langue), or actual speech (parole)

2. the word or linguistic sign as sound or written shape (the signifier), or the concept which it denotes, (the signified)

3. a division of the mental process of constructing sentences, into selection (of a word) and combination (of words into sentences), and visualizing these as two geometrical axes of language.

The dichotomy most important to literary study is the second: the word as binary sign, signifier and signified. While Saussure himself was not a relativist, his method of enquiry led him to the relativistic declaration that ‘in the language itself there are only differences, and no positive terms’ (Course, 166). Later Structuralist and Poststructuralist theory may be seen as an elaboration of this attitude.

Stating this dichotomy in simpler terms: building on the linguistic concept of the phoneme—the lowest level of recognizable, meaningful sound defined purely by its differences from other phonemes rather than by any inherent features—structuralism argues that the elements composing any cultural phenomenon (from cooking to drama) are similarly "relational": that is, they have meaning only by virtue of their contrasts with other elements of the system—especially in binary oppositions of paired opposites. Their meanings (the relationship between the signifier and the signified) can be established not by referring each element to any supposed equivalent in natural reality, but only by analyzing its function within a self-contained cultural code.

In practice, Structuralist analysis seeks the underlying system of codes or formulas (the langue) that governs individual utterances or instances of any created human activity or discourse (the parole). In formulating the laws by which elements of such a system are combined, it distinguishes between sets of interchangeable units (paradigms) and sequences of such units in combination (syntagms), thereby outlining a basic Structuralist "syntax" of human culture.

By treating language as such a code operating according to fixed rules, Saussure paved the way for other thinkers (like the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss—b. 1908) to view various human disciplines as languages likewise governed by codes.

Claude Lévi-Strauss, for instance, made exhaustive studies of the myth systems of various cultures. Once he had gathered and studies all the myths of a given society, he would apply the Structuralist method, isolating elements, looking for patterns of recurrence, seeking after the key that would reveal the logic according to which the parts were all fitted together These structures are homologous to Saussure’s concept of langue. They signify a system of differences that govern the possibilities of their contents, which are homologous to the concept of parole, or the specific utterance within such a system. Thus, any activity, from the actions in a narrative to not eating one’s peas with a knife, takes place within a system of differences and has meaning only in its relations to other possible activities within that system, not to some meaning that emanates from nature or the divine.

Thus, the core assumption of the Structuralist is that the human psyche itself is strictly patterned, and that, therefore, all human expression can be seen to embody those fundamental structures. The most obvious way in which we are ourselves patterned, according to the Structuralists, is in terms of our natural tendency to perceive and think in terms of binary oppositions. We break things into opposites: up and down, in and out, light and dark, and so on. This universal tendency naturally manifests itself in our artistic and cultural products. When the Structuralist looks to break the code, he/she looks first to one or another set of polarized terms. Thus, when Lévi-Strauss inventoried the ritual practices of one isolated tribal culture, he found his master key in the symbolic opposition of raw and cooked. He proposed that the entire tribal structure could be understood through an investigation of the complex associations and behaviors relating to the two ways of consuming food.

The Structuralist interpretation of patterns of human expression obviously includes its use of language. The Structuralist interpretation of language also perceives distinguishing patterns, types, or grammars of language that are recurrent in various types of literature. Suppose, for example, that you encounter opening passages like the following:

Once upon a time, a young prince fell in love with a young princess. He decided to tell her of his love, and early one morning he left his castle on his white charger, riding toward her castle home high in the mountains.

The words of these two passages create different and distinct frames of reference. One is a fairy tale, the other the internalized reflection of feeling. The passages therefore demonstrate how language itself fits into predetermined patterns or structures. Similar uses of language structures can be associated with other types of literature.

Structuralism as an approach to the literary work does have certain affinities with Formalism. Here, too, the text is closed off, and stripped of all cultural, historical, or biographical trappings. But where the Formalist looks for the ways in which meaning is achieved through the complex interplay of tensions, ironies, and the like, the Structuralist goes further still. His/Her purpose is to see through the particulars of the story or poem in order to expose the bare bones of design.

Besides the influence of Saussure, Structuralism was also informed by the work of the Russian Formalists and the narratological work of Vladimir Propp, especially his 1928 work Morphology of the Folktale.

Although Propp did not work with the Grimm brothers’ tale, "Cinderella," this folktale may serve as an example for Structuralist analysis. If a Structuralist critic were to read the work, he/she would not be concerned with the folk origins of the tale, or its meanings or implicit values. Rather, he/she would attempt to reveal how the work orchestrates a series of oppositions in regular patterns, as though according to a formula. The interest of the Structuralist critic would not be to evaluate, but simply to describe. Thus, our critic would likely take note of the contrasting roles of the wicked stepmother and the fairy godmother; the critic would reveal how Cinderella’s sooty rags are converted into sumptuous finery. The critic might, further, remark on the way that the tale begins with Cinderella in isolation, divorced from her true family, and how at the end she has married the prince and is set to begin a family of her own. The critic might find a symmetrical relation, too, between the punishments inflicted on Cinderella at the outset and the indignities that later befall the stepmother’s two cruel daughters.

In literary studies the concepts of structuralism have found their most influential articulations in the study of signs/symbols—semiotics and semiology. The impact of structuralism has perhaps been most important in its critique of mimetic theories of literature, which until the advent of structuralism and poststructuralism had dominated literary studies. Structuralism is distinguished by its rejection of those traditional notions according to which literature "expresses" an author’s meaning or "reflects" reality. Instead, the "text" is seen as an objective structure activating various codes and conventions which are independent of author, reader, and external reality. Structuralist criticism is less interested in interpreting what literary works mean than in explaining how they can mean what they mean; that is, in showing what implicit rules and conventions are operating in a given work to limit the possibilities of meanings in a text.

Structuralism is not equally useful for literary analysis of all genres. Although there have been some notable attempts to apply Structuralist theories to the analysis of poetry, such as Michael Riffaterre’s Semiotics of Poetry, the difficulty with such works has been the reproduction of those aspects of formalism which have been most stridently attacked in literary circles: the conception of the text as autonomous and impersonal, standing outside the social practices of language, and an emphasis on obscure patterns and structures that are unavailable to all but the most sophisticated—and in some accounts creative—critic.

Structural analyses of narrative have been considerably better received. The French critic Roland Barthes was an outstanding practitioner of Structuralist literary analysis—notably in his book S/Z (1970) in which he identifies the various codes at work in a short story by Balzac. Other critics, like Gérard Genette in his Figures of Discourse and Tzvetan Todorov in The Politics of Prose, also provide early examples of the ways that structuralism might be used as a method of literary analysis.

Many critics who also represent other methodologies also share the Structuralist’s concerns; particularly:

Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (1929), Rabelais and His World (1940) emphasized the use of language (parole) in literature, which he saw as fundamentally dialogic. He described ‘polyphonic’ works which realize the freedom of individual dramatic voices as ‘carnival literature’. Bakhtin’s approach was more dynamic than merely structural: ‘Dialogic relations ... do not reside in the system of language.’

Roman Jakobson, Linguistics and Poetics (1958) extended the Structuralist analysis of language from form to function. He analyzed language as a message in which any of six different functions may be foregrounded (a term derived from Mukarovsky). He also identified Saussure’s two axes of language (the third dichotomy noted above: the word-world relation and the relation between signifiers) with the tropes of metaphor and metonymy. This seemed to open poetic language to systematic linguistic analysis. Jakobson was second only to Saussure in his importance as a linguist, and was the power-house behind the application of linguistic theory to other disciplines.

The impact of structuralism has been felt even in disciplines outside literature and anthropology. In cultural studies, Ronald Barthes’s Mythologies (1957) offers insightful and witty Structuralist-informed analyses of soap powders and detergents, wrestling, strip tease, and other cultural phenomena. The historical analyses of Michel Foucault in works like The Birth of the Clinic and especially The Order of Things have often been labeled Structuralist, though Foucault repeatedly denied the label. The work of French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser is commonly described as structural Marxism, while the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s theory that the unconscious is organized like a language also has affinities with Structuralist thought. In recent years, Poststructuralism has repudiated the claims of scientific or objective analysis that accompanied much early Structuralist work. This is not to say that Poststructuralism has abandoned its antecedents entirely. While addressing issues like author, ideology, and reader—Issues usually disregarded by Structuralism—it has continued to insist on the conventional, constructed character of meaning and on the importance of difference in that construction, even as it has used them to critique structuralism itself.

Structuralism itself has, in recent decades, been under sharp critical attack. Given the essential assumption of the Structuralist—that all human expression is patterned—it would follow that any work can be explored in just this fashion. Indeed, ingenious critics have come up with the most remarkable readings of the least likely of literary works. What’s more, a number of Structuralists have made the assertion that the artistic quality of the work is irrelevant to the operation. One can just as readily deconstruct a Donald Duck comic as a story by Tolstoy. This fact alone suggests the limits of application. The Structuralist approach is an interesting and instructive approach, but as much as it discloses, it necessarily blinds the reader to what is ultimately the point of literature—it turns its back on meaning.

Structuralism does not have the currency it had a few decades ago. Its strongest legacy is that it gave rise to the far more influential—and still vital—practice of Deconstruction.