Structuralistic Criticism and Gerard Genette Essay Example for Free

Structuralistic Criticism and Gerard Genette EssayGerard Genette writes at the outset in his essay Structuralism and Literary Criticism that regularitys developed for the battlefield of one discipline could be satisfactorily applied to the study of other discipline as well. This is what he c totallys intellectual bricolage , borrowing a depot from Claude Levi-Strauss. This is on the nose so, so far as structural sociology is concerned. Structuralism is the name given to Saussures approach to manner of speaking as a establishment of sex actship. But it is applied also to the study of philosophy, lit and other sciences of humanity. Structuralism as a method is peculiarly imitable to literary criticism which is a word upon a intervention . Literary criticism in that it is meta-linguistic in character and comes into being / existence as metaliterature. In his words it can therefore be metaliterature, that is to say, a literature of which literature is the imposed disapprov e. That is, it is literature written to explain literature and spoken communication used in it to explain the role of language in literature. In Genettes words, if the author questions the universe, the critic questions literature, that is to say, the universe of signs.But what was a sign for the writer (the work) becomes meaning for the critic (since it is the object of the critical discourse), and in another way what was meaning for the writer (his posture of the world) becomes a sign for the critic, as the theme and symbol of a certain literary nature. promptly this being so, there is certain room for readers interpretation. Levi-Strauss is quite right when he says that the critic always puts something of himself into the works he read. The Structuralist method of criticismLiterature, being primarily a work of language, and structuralism in its part, being preeminently a linguistic method, the most probable encounter should obviously back out place on the terrain of linguis tic material. Sound, forms, words and sentences constitute the common object of the linguist and the philologist to some(prenominal) an extent that it was possible, in the early Russian Formalist movement, to define literature as a mere dialect, and to conceive of its study as an annex of general dialectology. Traditional criticism regards criticism as a heart without code Russian Formalism regards literature as code without message.Structuralism by structural outline makes it possible to uncover the connection that exists between a system of forms and a system of meanings, by substitution the search for term by term analysis with one for over all homologies (likeness, similarity). Meaning is yielded by the structural relationship within a given work. It is not introduced from outside. Genette believed that the structural study of poetic language and of the forms of literary expression cannot reject the analysis of the relations between code and message.The ambition of structur alism is not confined to counting feet and to observe the repetition of phonemes it must also study semantic (word meaning) phenomena which constitute the force of poetic language. It is in this reference that Genette writes one of the newest and most fruitful directions that are now opening up for literary research ought to be the structural study of the large unities of discourse, beyond the framework which linguistics in the strict sense cannot cross of the sentence.One would thus study systems from a much higher aim of generality, such as narrative, description and the other major forms of literary expression. There would be linguistics of discourse that was a translinguistics. Genette empathetically defines Structuralism as a method is based on the study of structures wheresoever they occur. He further adds, But to begin with, structures are not directly encountered objects far from it they are systems of potential relations, conceived rather than perceived, which analysi s constructs as it uncovers them, and which it runs the risk of inventing while believing that it is discovering them.Furthermore, structuralism is not a method it is also what Ernst Cassirer calls a general tendency of thought or as others would say (more crudely) an ideology, the prejudice of which is precisely to value structures at the expense of substances. Genette is of the view that any analysis that confines itself to a work without considering its sources or motives would be implicitly structuralist, and the structural method ought to intervene in order to give this immanent study a sort of rationality of understanding that would replace the rationality of explanation abandoned with the search of causes. conflicting Russian Formalist, Structuralists like Genette gave importance to thematic study also. Thematic analysis, writes Genette, would tend spontaneously to stop and to be tested in a structural synthesis in which the different themes are group in networks, in order to extract their full meaning from their place and function in the system of the work. Thus, structuralism would appear to be a refuge for all immanent criticism against the danger of atomization that threatens thematic analysis.Genette believes that structural criticism is untainted by any of the transcendent reductions of psychoanalysis or Marxist explanation. He further writes, It exerts, in its own way, a sort of inborn reduction, traversing the substance of the work in order to reach its bone-structure certainly not a superficial examination, but a sort of radioscopic penetration, and all the more external in that it is more penetrating. Genette observes relationship between structuralism and hermeneutics also.He writes thus the relation that binds structuralism and hermeneutics together might not be one of mechanical separation and exclusion, but of complementarity on the subject of the same work, hermeneutic criticism might speak the language of the assumption of meaning and of internal recreation, and structural criticism that of distant speech and intelligible reconstruction. They would, thus, bring out complementary significations, and their dialogue would be all the more fruitful.Thus to conclude we may say, the structuralist idea is to follow literature in its overall evolution, while making synchronic cuts at various stages and comparing the tables one with another. Literary evolution past appears in all its richness, which derives from the fact that the system survives while constantly altering. In this sense literary chronicle becomes the history of a system it is the evolution of the functions that is significant, not that of the elements, and knowledge of the synchronic relations necessarily precedes that of the processes.