Procedures of Criticism; Structuralism

Structuralism is so pervasive across cultural studies that it almost becomes a field of enquiry in its own right. It appears on this website at ‘factual’ level when building a language of encoding and decoding sign systems; at the ‘conceptual’ level wherein students begin thinking about the interconnectedness of sign systems; as a procedure of critical analysis; and though it has not yet been written, will surely become a meta-cognition of critical analysis too.

It’s breadth of influences both at the theoretical level and the application level is so wide, that it can’t help become seemingly self contradictory and almost unwieldy. In using the approaches of Structuralism one way, a critic is sure to find disdain from one or other critical school, so that any act of Structuralist analysis seems itself to be ideological, moral and subjective. There seems to be almost as many critical approaches within Structuralism as there are critical approaches outside of structuralism (though, it can be argued that all critical approaches are themselves structuralist – Structuralism is the paradigm of all critical analysis).

DoE is attempting to produce out of the discourse of Structuralism some procedure to follow that students might become better readers, but it is not beyond the possibility that Structuralism cannot be used as a procedure until some other critical perspective within it has been named and followed.

Rick Rylance, in his Debating Texts, brings together his own thoughts with essays of other academics and it is through this text we hope to come to some meaningful thoughts as to how it can be used in a Secondary school setting.

So what is the raison d’etre of Structuralist thinking?

Structuralism’s intellectual range is enormous. At its broadest it can be said to engage with any structured activity whose laws it proposes to uncover. This its influence is felt in a wide range of disciplines from the hard sciences, such as physics or biology, to the humanities where its applications are most contentious. Within literary criticism, however, it is primarily as a theory of language that its effects have been most powerful. The extrapolations made from this theory of language are seen by its opponents to threaten the humanistic core of literary studies (p68).

Describing the laws from a structuralist perspective comes with its own set of terms to do so:

• Langue: the general system of [language / meanings being communicated]
  • Phonemes: the range of possible ‘sounds’ made within a langue, like available colours to an artist
    • Sign: a phoneme that is meaningful
      • Signifier: the concrete form imparting the meaning
      • Signified: the recipient of the signifier, the thing being pointed to, which exists as a mental concept. The signifier ‘wealth’ can give different conceptual signified meanings to different recipients.
      • Referent: the actual object which might exist in the real world for which our conceptual ‘signified’ is merely a representation of.
        • Differential meanings: we assign to objects as a way of distinguishing ‘one from many’; all signs are in effect a kind of definite articles which assert ‘not that one’ as much as they assert ‘this one’.
  • Syntagmatic axis: the rules of combinations that make an utterance ‘grammatical’; the laws that connect signs into meaningful sequences
  • paradigmatic axis: that variable terms that can take each space along the syntagmatic axis
• Parole: an utterance made possible by the system

The ‘sounds’ are only considered phonemes within a language when they have meaning attached to them – so that the many sounds possible which have no associated meaning are excluded from the analysis. What we are concerned with is phonemes that become ‘meaningful’. Sounds which carry meanings are signs and they consist of two parts; the concrete signifier and the abstract signified meaning.

Phonemes are all signifiers, but a sound made with no meaning attached to it, nothing signified, cannot be a sign. A scribble on a sheet of paper is a signifier capable of having some concept attached to it, but until that is done the scribble is not a sign.

This argues that phonemes are not signs to all audiences; a cloud for instance appears as merely a random phoneme possible to the atmosphere and carries little to no meaning in normal appearance. But to a meteorologist trained in reading weather systems, clouds are signifiers that carry a conceptual significance. Signs, to be signs, require training, and a person needs to exists within a cultural group of people able to share in that knowledge. My child draws a scribble that I magnetize to my freezer, because it conveys meaning to me. But I cannot use that as part of a langue, through which I can communicate to others because it is meaningless to them. That community is a culture who share in the usage and shaping of meaning.

But we should assert again here that ‘langue’ need not exclusively mean spoken linguistic communication, and the application of structuralism is equally applicable to images, sounds, social study and cultural theory. The focus of structuralism is on the identification of the functional features of a meaning system.

These representations will then be analysed in terms of these structural rules by which they are organised, and hence have meaning and significance within a culture (p73).

Roland Barthes expresses this sense of structuralism thus:

One can say that the critical task is purely formal: not to discover in the work of the author something hidden, profound, or secret which hitherto passed unnoticed, but only to adjust the language his period of forwards him to the formal system of logical constraints [applied within some system of meaning production]… We might say that for criticism, the only way of avoiding good conscience or bad faith is to take as a moral goal not the decipherment of the works meaning but the reconstruction of the rules and constraints of that meanings elaboration; Provided we admit at once that a literary work is a very special semantic system, whose goal is to put ‘meaning in the world’, but not ‘a meaning’ (p84).

This sounds awfully complex then; a rule system needs to be followed by many people within a shared culture, for transference of meaning to be possible. Where interlocutors within this culture differ in the conceptual signified – where the definition of a sign is not agreed – transference cannot occur. So structuralism is naturally a data gathering exercise; masses of speakers need consulting to work out what rules they are all following together. Students at secondary school are not going to embark upon this. It is our job to look at the rules that have been discovered by academics.

This elevates the need for explicit teaching and not discovery learning; it should not be hoped that students will ‘see for themselves’ the underlying structure within langue systems that govern the making of meaning. It is far to complex and quantitative. The rules need stating, explicating, modelling and working.

The following is an introduction to some key structuralist insights:

Introduction to Todorov’s Narrative Structuralism

One of my very favourite structures of meaning is that proposed by Todorov and his theory of Narrative Structure.

Tzvetan Todorov argues that all narratives share a deep structural pattern: they move from a state of equilibrium, through a disruption, towards a restoration of order. What matters for Todorov is not the content of the story but the transformations it undergoes. Narrative, he suggests, is organised by a sequence of formal shifts:

• a stable situation
• a disturbance of that stability
• the recognition of that disturbance
• attempts to repair it
• the establishment of a new equilibrium

This pattern is not a formula for writing stories but a structural grammar underlying how stories generate meaning. Todorov’s model exemplifies the structuralist belief that texts are governed by rules and relations, and that meaning emerges from the patterned movement between these states rather than from any individual theme or interpretation.

Introduction to Greimas’s Actantial Model (roles and relations)

A further structuralist framework comes from Algirdas Julien Greimas, who shifts attention from plot events to the relational roles that make narrative meaning possible. Greimas argues that beneath the surface variety of characters lies a stable set of actants—fundamental positions in a narrative structure such as Subject, Object, Helper, Opponent, Sender, and Receiver. These actants are not people but functions, defined by their relations to one another. What matters is the structural configuration: the Subject pursues the Object; the Helper enables that pursuit; the Opponent obstructs it. By mapping these relations, Greimas shows that narrative meaning emerges not from individual characters or themes but from the deep grammar of roles and oppositions that organise every story.

Introduction to Lévi‑Strauss (myth, binary oppositions, and structural relations)

Claude Lévi‑Strauss extends structuralism into the study of myth, arguing that myths from different cultures share underlying structures that can be revealed through analysis of their binary oppositions—life/death, nature/culture, raw/cooked, order/chaos. For Lévi‑Strauss, myths do not express individual or cultural psychology; they operate like languages, governed by deep relational patterns that organise meaning. What matters is not the story’s surface content but the mythemes—the smallest units of narrative—and the ways these units are arranged into oppositional pairs. By mapping these relations, Lévi‑Strauss shows that meaning emerges from the structural logic that myths use to resolve contradictions, making his work a foundational example of structuralism’s commitment to uncovering the hidden systems that shape human storytelling.

Introduction to Barthes’s Codes (structural units of meaning)

Roland Barthes extends structuralism into the analysis of how texts produce meaning, proposing that narratives are organised not by themes or authorial intention but by a network of codes—repeatable structures that guide the reader’s movement through the text. In S/Z, Barthes identifies five such codes: the Hermeneutic (questions and delays), the Proairetic (actions and sequences), the Semantic (connotations), the Symbolic (deep oppositions), and the Cultural (shared knowledge). These codes operate simultaneously, generating layers of meaning through their interplay. For Barthes, the text is not a container of ideas but a system of signifying units, and criticism becomes the task of tracing how these structural codes organise the reader’s experience. Meaning, therefore, is not discovered but produced through the patterned operations of the codes themselves.

Introduction to Propp’s Archetypal Characters (structural roles)

Alongside his sequence of functions, Vladimir Propp identifies a set of archetypal character roles that recur across folktales. These are not psychological portraits but structural positions generated by the narrative system itself. Propp names seven such roles: the Hero (who seeks), the Villain (who opposes), the Donor (who provides a magical agent), the Helper (who assists the hero), the Princess and her Father (who represent the object of the quest and its reward), and the Dispatcher (who sends the hero on their journey). What matters for Propp is not who these characters are but what they do: their identity is defined entirely by their function within the narrative structure. This reinforces the structuralist principle that meaning arises from relations and roles, not from individual character psychology or thematic interpretation.

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Structuralism then starts with a terminology of Langue, sign and axioms, which is the core universality of many other structuralist observations. Each of those brings with it a range of terminology. Students will come to learn about the grammar of Language and Literature through their studies but importantly need to be aware that these findings are intended to discuss large swathes of texts and how meaning is shaped. And just like speakers of a native language, we might understand the meaning of sign systems, even if we do not understand the rules which we have unconsciously agreed to.