THEORY AUTHORS CONCEPTS

New Criticism  Dominant Anglo-American traditions of criticisms in the mid 20th century
 Scientific Approach and Objective Criticism of the text
 Obsessive concern with “the text itself”, “the words on the page”, nothing more or less
 Not concern with the context, it is concerned with the text itself with its language and organization; it does not seek a text’s meaning, but
how it speaks itself
 Concerned to trace how the part of the text relate, how it achieves its order and harmony, how it contains and resolve “irony”,
“paradox”, “tension”, “ambivalence” and “ambiguity”
 Concerned essentially with articulating the very poem-ness of the poem itself
 Objective Correlative – for the experience which may have engendered it an impersonal recreation which is the autonomous object of
attention… notion of the image… tradition of works which most successfully hold an essence of human experience in their constituent
medium.
 Encouraged close reading of the texts and it is intellectual and historical abstraction, a kind of democratization of literary study in the
classroom, in which nearly everyone was placed on an equal footing in the face of a blind text.
 [John Crooke Ransom] Criticism should become more scientific or precise and systematic; students should “study literature” and not
merely about literature.
 [Cleanth Brooks] rejects the relevance of biography; reiterates throughout the terms ‘dramatic propriety’, ‘irony’, ‘paradox’ and organic
context, performs a bravura reading of the poem which leaves the sententious final dictum as a dramatically organic element of the
whole; constantly admires the poem’s history above the ‘actual’ histories of war and peace
 New Criticism is combined attention to the specific verbal ordering of texts with an emphasis on the non-conceptual nature of literary
meaning.
 Modern Criticism has shown as that to speak of content as such is not to speak of art at all, but of experience; and that it is only when
we speak of the achieved content, the form, the work of art as a work of art, that we speak as critics.
 Novel’s own technique is language
Moral  This close address to the text is only ever to establish the vitality of its “felt life”, its closeness to experience to prove its moral force and
Formalism to demonstrate (by close scrutiny) its excellence.
 [Eliot] Identify the great works of literature… works that will promote the values of life: awareness of the possibilities of life
 Literature is a weapon in battle of cultural politics and much of the “great” literature of the past
 Great works of literature are vessels in which humane values survive but for Leavis they are also to be actively deployed in
ethnosociological cultural politics.
Russian Viktor  Russian formalism is distinctive for its emphasis on the functional role of literary devices and its original conception of literary
Formalism Shklovsky history. Russian Formalists advocated a "scientific" method for studying poetic language, to the exclusion of traditional
psychological and cultural-historical approaches.
Yury  Simultaneous with New Criticism
Tynyanov  The first Russian Formalists considered that human “content” (emotions, ideas, and reality in general) possessed no literary
significance in itself, but merely provided a context for the functioning of literary devices.
Boris  Formalism – Seeks out meaning from a work by giving attention to the form or structure of a work and literary devices operating
Eikhenbaum in it.
 Literariness: through the process of defamiliarization art needs to use innovation and getting away from the things that are common
familiar or vague to become art itself.
 Defamiliarization – refers to the process when language affects our perception on how we see things. Things turn out to have a
completely different meaning. Defamiliarization changes our responses to the world by only by submitting our habitual perceptions to a
processing by literary form.
 The formalists don’t discard the history and social function completely . Instead, in the study of literary evolution, they focus on the
modification of literary devices through history
 It is judging the book by it cover
 We should determine the form, structure and devices used in the text instead of checking biographies, social and historical
background of the author.
 The formalist avoided the New Critics’ tendency to endow aesthetic form with moral and cultural significance
 Formalists aimed rather to outline models and hypotheses (in a scientific spirit) to explain how aesthetic effects are produced by literary
devices and how the literary is distinguished from and related to the “extra literary”. While the new critics regarded literature as a form of
human understanding, the formalists though of it as a special use of language.
 OPOJAZ (Society for the Study of Poetic Language)
 The OPOJAZ, the Society for the Study of Poetic Language group, headed by Viktor Shklovsky was primarily concerned with the
Formal method and focused on technique and device. "Literary works, according to this model, resemble machines: they are the
result of an intentional human activity in which a specific skill transforms raw material into a complex mechanism suitable for a
particular purpose" (Steiner, "Russian Formalism" 18). This approach strips the literary artifact from its connection with the
author, reader, and historical background.
 "Jakobson makes it clear that he rejects completely any notion of emotion as the touchstone of literature. For Jakobson, the
emotional qualities of a literary work are secondary to and dependent on purely verbal, linguistic facts".
 Eichenbaum, however, criticised Shklovsky and Jakubinsky for not disengaging poetry from the outside world completely, since they
 used the emotional connotations of sound as a criterion for word choice.

Structuralis  Structuralism is an approach to the study of human culture, centered on the search for constraining patterns or structures, which
m claims that individual phenomena have meaning only by virtue of their relation to other phenomena as elements within a
systematic structure.
 Agrees that literature has a special relationship with language: it draws attention to the very nature and specific properties of
language. Structuralist poetics are closely related to Formalism.
 Of particular interest to the structuralist is “how” a text conveys meaning rather than what meaning is conveyed.

 Writers have the power to mix already existing writings, to reassemble or re-deploy them; writers cannot use writing to “express”
themselves, but only to draw upon that immense dictionary of language and culture which is ‘always already written’.
 Structuralism neither accepts analytical postulate nor prescriptive imperative
 The methods of structural linguistics can be successfully generalized as to apply to all aspects of human culture (semiology,
semiotics).
 “A concept is not my concept; I hold it in common with other men”.
 The “collective consciousness is a synthesis sui generis of particular consciousness”.
 This synthesis has the effect of disengaging a whole world of sentiments, ideas, and images which, once born, obey laws all of their
own”.
 The collective consciousness is thus absolutely central to social order: it is only through it that society is able to control, indeed
construct, the individual human personalities which inhabit it.
 The “real characteristic of religious phenomena is that they always suppose a bipartite division of the whole universe into two classes
which embrace all that exists, but which radically exclude each other”.
 Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics first published in 1916
 Every language is in itself an entirely discrete system, the units of which can be identified only in terms of their relationships to
each other, and not by reference to any other linguistic or extra-linguistic system.
 We discover what system of rules, what grammar is being used
 Sign, Signifier and Signified
 “A science that studies the life of signs within society is conceivable”.
 [Saussure] Words are not symbols which correspond to referents, but rather are signs which are made up of two parts
 It is usual to regard structuralism and semiotics as belonging to the same theoretical universe
 Structuralism is concerned with systems which do not involve ‘signs’ as such but which can be treated in the same way as sign-
 systems.
 [Yury Lotman] Literary works have more value because they have a higher information load’ than non-literary texts.
 Phoneme – meaningful sound, one that is recognized or perceived by a language user
 Underlying our use of language is a SYSTEM, a pattern of paired opposites, binary oppositions.
 Nasalized/non-nasalized/vocalic/non-vocalic/voiced/unvoiced/tense/lax
 Five major characteristics of structuralism: positivism, anti-historicism, adherence to a possible politics of demystification,
theoreticism, anti-humanism
 Structuralists present the idea that “the author is dead and that literary discourse has no truth function”.
 They also oppose the belief that the human subject is the source and origin of literary meaning.
 For structuralist critics, the notion “structure” has another meaning, one which derives from linguistics and anthropology and which
refers to the system of signs that designate meaning.
 Propp’s approach [function] the basic unit of the narrative language and refers to the significant actions which form the
narrative
 Levi Strauss is not interested in the narrative sequence, but in the structural pattern which gives the myth its meaning
 The source of meaning is no longer the writer’s or the reader’s experience but the operations and oppositions which govern
language. Meaning is determined no longer by the individual but by the system which governs the individual.
 Heart of Structuralism, is a scientific ambition to discover the codes, the rules, the systems, which underlie all human social
and cultural practices.

Marxism  Literature is in relation with the economic status of society

 Society is propelled by its economy which is manipulated by the class system
 Ploretariat – workers--- History and art convince them to remain lower class
 Bourgeois – owners. Creators and manipulations of history and art
 OBJECTIVE: Unmask our limited view of society’s structures
 Marxism attempts to reveal the ways in which our socioeconomic system is the ultimate source of our experience (Tyson)
 Socioeconomic system is the source of our experience. Economic structure determine our experiences in life.
 Economic determinist theory… Society is an opposition between the capitalists and the working class
 Oppression.. Marxism is interested to the working class experiences of suppression… Class struggles
 Superstructure – (ideology, politics, law, theology, literature…) (consciousness) (Economics influences everything in life)
 Base (Infrastructure- tools) Means of Production --- Economic reality --- SOCIAL BEING
 Comes after Russian Formalism
 “Karl Marx” – It is not consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that
determines their existence”. Our ability to think for ourselves is limited: our ideas are shaped by the material conditions of
life.
 Borrows from other school of thoughts
 Marxism did not begin as an alternative, theoretical approach to literary analysis
 Before many 20th century writers and critics embraced the principles of Marxism, it had already flourished in the 19 th century as a
pragmatic view of history that offered the working classes of society an opportunity to change their world and lives
 Philosophy has been merely airy contemplation; it is time that it engaged with the real world
 Hegel and his followers in German philosophy have persuaded us that the world is governed by thought, that the process of history is
the gradual dialectical unfolding of the laws of Reason, and that material existence is the expression of an immaterial spiritual
essence
 Marx develops what has become known as dialectical materialism, the core beliefs of Marxism. Marx declares that
“consciousness does not determine life: life determines consciousness”
 People have been led to believe that their ideas, their cultural life, their legal systems, and their religions were the creations
of human and divine reason which should be regarded as the unquestioned guides to human life.
 Culture is not an independent reality but is inseparable from the historical conditions which human beings create their material lives.
 The relations of exploitation and domination which govern the social and economic order of a particular phase of human history will in
some sense ‘determine’ the whole cultural life of the society.
 The conflict of social classes establishes the ground upon which ideological conflicts arise.
 Artistic Creation – is a changing and a transformation of reality in accordance with the peculiar laws of art


 In literary theory, a Marxist interpretation reads the text as an expression of contemporary class struggle. Literature is not
simply a matter of personal expression or taste. It somehow relates to the social and political conditions of the time.
 Karl Marx theorized that human beings are the product of their social and economic environment.
  Literature, for Marx, belongs to the superstructure (along with law, theology, politics, etc.). The challenge, then, is to see how it is
influenced by the economic base.
 Marx himself often treated literature as simple propaganda for the ruling classes.
 Literature thus reveals to us the spirit of the times, the issues that mattered to people. Literature (and entertainment) is about much
more than enjoyment or escapism: it is a manifestation of class struggle.
SOCIALIST  A work of art of any period achieves this quality by expressing a high level of social awareness, revealing a sense of the true
REALISM social conditions and feelings of a particular epoch.
 Capitalist division of labour destroyed an earlier phase of human history in which artistic and spiritual life were inseparable from the
processes of material existence and craftsmen still worked with a sense of beauty
 ONLY FOLK ART SURVIVED AS THE PEOPLE’S ART
 The appreciation of high art was professionalized, dominated by the market economy and limited to a privileged section of the
ruling class. The truly popular art of socialist societies, will be accessible to the masses and will restore their lost wholeness of
being.
 Social Realism treat the class nature of art as a simple matter of writer’s explicit class allegiance.
 Realism transcends class sympathies.
 Socialist Realism was considered to be a continuation and development of bourgeois realism at a high level.
 Bourgeois writers are judged not according to their class origins or explicit political commitment, but by the extent to which their
writings reveal insights into the social developments of their time.
 Social Realism officially sanctioned theory and method of literary composition prevalent in the Soviet Union from 1932 to the 1980s.
For that period of history Socialist Realism was the sole criterion for measuring literary works.
 Socialist Realism thus looks back to Romanticism in that it encourages a certain heightening and idealizing of heroes and events to
mold the consciousness of the masses.
 Social Realism favoured realistic illusion, formal unity and positive heroes.
STRUCTURALIST MARXISM
 Individuals cannot be understood apart from their social existence
 Individuals are bearers of position in the social system and not free agents
 Texts are creation of individual genius and argued that they are based upon ‘trans-individual’ mental structures belonging to a
particular group (or classes)
 These worldviews are perpetually being constructed and dissolved by social groups as they adjust their mental image of the world in
response to the changing reality before them.
 Structural Marxism is an approach to Marxist philosophy based on structuralism, primarily associated with the work of the French
 philosopher Louis Althusser and his students.
 Marxism was a science that examined objective structures
 Structuralist Marxism disputes the instrumentalist view that the state can be viewed as the direct servant of the capitalist or ruling
class
 Structuralists view the state in a capitalist mode of production as taking a specifically capitalist form, not because particular
individuals are in powerful positions, but because the state reproduces the logic of capitalist structure in its economic, legal, and
political institutions.
 Hence, from a structuralist perspective one would argue that state institutions (including legal ones) function in the long-term interests
of capital and capitalism, rather than in the short-term interests of members of the capitalist class. Thus the state and its institutions
have a certain degree of independence from specific elites in the ruling or capitalist class.
Feminism  Like feminism itself, feminist literary theory asks us to consider the relationships between men and women and their relative
roles in society. Much feminist literary theory reminds us that the relationship between men and women in society is often
unequal and reflects a particular patriarchal ideology.
 Women writers and women readers have always had to work against the grain--- Aristotle [female is female by virtue of a certain lack
of qualities]
 St. Thomas Aquinas [woman is an imperfect man]
 Much of this early “first wave” feminism remained quite fundamentally utilitarian and liberal in theoretical disposition, its central
agitational focus provided by the demand for female suffrage.
 By the end of the 1920s, the battle of for the suffrage had been won: women aged over 30 secured the vote in 1918, all adult women
in 1928.
 Feminism lay dormant for forty years. But just as the sixties’s student movement had refurbished the New Left, so to it unleashed a
new, “second wave”, feminism.
 The campus milieu provided support and inspiration to both the new women’s liberation groups and the new student socialist groups
which they were occasionally intertwined.
 In 1971, Germaine Greer, then still lecturer in English at Warwick University, had published “The Female Eunuch” which soon
became one of the key texts of the international women’s movement.
Virginia Woolf
 Woolf initiated an enduringly feminist concern with the material constraints on women’s cultural production; and also a novel
redefinition of the Arnoldian disinterestedness as androgynous, which, though by no means uncontroversial amongst feminists, has
nonetheless been seen by some as representing a first, tentative, step toward a distinctively feminist aesthetic.
 She also registered the possibility of a peculiarly female type of writing, characterized by a sentence “of a more elastic fiber…capable
 of stretching to the extreme, of suspending the frailest particles, of enveloping the vaguest shapes” (Woolf, 1979).
 Woolf laid the foundation for present-day feminist criticism in her seminal work “A Room of One’s Own”. In this text, Woolf declares
that men have and continue to treat women as inferiors.
 It is the male, she asserts, who defines what it means to be female and who controls the political, economic, social, and literary
structures.
 Agreeing with Samuel T. Coleridge that great minds possess both male and female characterizes, she hypothesizes in her text the
existence of Shakespeare’s sister, one who is equally as gifted as a writer as Shakespeare himself.
 Her gender, however, prevents her from having “a room of her own.” Because she is a woman, she cannot obtain education or find
profitable employment. The room is Woolf’s symbol of the solitude and autonomy needed to seclude one’s self from the world and its
social constraints in order to find to think and write.
 Ultimately, Shakespeare’s sister dies alone without any acknowledgement of her personal genius and even her grave bears not her
name, for she is buried in an unmarked grave simply because she is female.
 This kind of loss of artistic talent and personal worthiness, says Woolf, is the direct result of society’s opinion of women: to wit, that
they are intellectually inferior to men.
 Women, Woolf argues, must reject this social construct and establish their own identity.
 Women must challenge the prevailing, false cultural notions about their gender identity and develop a female discourse that
will accurately portray their relationship “to the world of reality and not to the world of men”.
Simone de Beauvoir
 With the 1949 publication of “The Second Sex”, feminist interests were once again surfacing. Heralded as the foundational work of
20th century feminism, Beauvoir’s text declares that French society (and Western societies in general) are patriarchal, controlled by
males.
 Like Woolf before, Beauvoir believed that the male in these societies defines what it means to be human, including, therefore, what it
means to be female.
 Since the female is not male, Beauvoir asserted, she becomes the Other, an object whose existence is defined and interpreted by
the male, the dominant being in society.
 Beauvoir asserts that a woman must break the bonds of her patriarchal society and define herself if she wishes to become a
significant human being in her own right and defy male classification as the Other.
 Accordingly, women must define themselves outside the present societal construct and reject being labeled as the Other.
Kate Millett
 With the advent of the 1960’s and its political activism and social concerns, feminist issues found new voices, and prominent among
 them is Kate Millett.
 With her publication of “Sexual Politics” in 1969, a new wave of feminism begins. Millett is one of the first feminists to challenge the
social ideological characteristics of both the make and the female.
 Millett argues that that one’s sex is determined at birth. However, one’s gender is a social construct created by cultural ideals and
norms.
 Consciously or unconsciously, women and men conform to the cultural ideas established for them by society. Conforming to these
prescribed sex roles dictated by society is what Millett calls “social politics”.
 Women, Millett maintains, must revolt against the power center of their culture: male dominance.
 In order to do so, women must establish female social conventions for themselves by establishing and articulating female discourse,
literary studies, and feminist theory.
Feminism and Literature in the 1960’s and 1970’s
 Feminists began to examine the traditional literary canon and discovered example after example of male dominance and prejudice
that supported Beauvoir’s and Millett’s assertion that males considered the female as “the Other”, an unnatural or deviant being.
 First, stereotypes of women abounded in the canon: Women were sex maniacs, goddesses of beauty, mindless entities, or old
spinsters.
 Second, while Dickens, Wordsworth, Hawthorne, Thoreau, and Twain, and a host of other male authors found their way into the
established canon, few female authors achieved such status.
 Third, the roles of female, fictionalized characters were limited to secondary positions, more frequently than not occupying minor
parts within the stories or simply reverting to the male’s stereotypical images of women.
 Fourth, female scholars such as Virginia Woolf and Simone de Beauvoir were ignored, their writings seldom, if ever, referred to by
the male crafters of the literary canon.
 Feminists of this era asserted that these males and their male counterparts who created and enjoyed a place of prominence within
the canon assumed that all readers were males.
 Questions concerning the male or female qualities of literary form, style, voice, and theme became the rallying points for feminist
criticism, and throughout the late 1970s books that defined women’s writings in feminine terms have flourished.
Elaine Showalter
 The dominating voice of feminist criticism throughout the 1980s is that of Elaine Showalter. In her text “A Literature of Their Own”
(1977), Showalter chronicles what she believes to be the three historical phases of the evolution in female writing.
 The “feminine” phase (1840-1880), the “feminist” phase (1880-1920), and the “female” phase (1970 to present).
 During the “feminine” phase, writers such as Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, and George Sand accepted the prevailing social
 constructs of their day on the role and therefore the definition of women. These female authors wrote under male pseudonyms,
hoping to equal the intellectual and artistic achievement of their male counterparts.
 During the “feminist” phase, women female authors dramatized the plight of the “slighted” woman. These authors depicted the harsh
and often cruel treatment of female characters at the hands of their more powerful male creations.
 At present, in the “female” phase, women reject the imitation prominent during the “feminine” phase and the protest that dominated
the “feminist” phase. Showalter points out that feminist critics now concern themselves with developing a peculiarly female
understanding of the female experience in art, including a feminine analysis of literary forms and techniques gynocriticism. Such a
task necessarily includes the uncovering of misogyny in male texts, a term Showalter uses to describe the male hatred of women.

Feminist criticism is a form of literary criticism that's based on feminist theories. Broadly, it's understood to be concerned with the politics of
feminism, and it uses feminist principles to critique the male-dominated literature.
Feminist criticism's roots are in women's social, political, economic and psychological oppression. By seeking to view women in a new
perspective and discover women's contributions to literary history, feminist criticism aims to reinterpret the old texts and establish the
importance of women's writing to save it from being lost or ignored in the male-dominated world. It also seeks to establish female
perspectives as being of equal importance relative to male perspective
Reader-  Text has no real existence until it is read
Oriented  Addressee is often actively involved in constructing a meaning
 The addressee is not a passive recipient of an entirely formulated meaning, but an active agent in the making of meaning.
 Reader-oriented criticism – reader must act upon the textual material in order to produce meaning

Phenomenology:
 The perceiver’s central role in determining meaning
 Edmund Husserl [the proper object of philosophical investigation is the content of our consciousness and not objects in the world]
 Consciousness is always of something, and it is the ‘something’ which appears to our consciousness which is truly real to us.
 Phenomena – “Things appearing”
 Phenomenology claims to show us the underlying nature both of human consciousness and of phenomena.
 In literary theory this approach di not encourage a purely subjective concern for the critic’s mental structure but a type of criticism
which tries to enter into the world of a writer’s works and to arrive at an understanding of the underlying nature of essence of the
writings as they appear to the critic’s consciousness.
 Our consciousness both projects the things of the world and at the same time is subjected to the world by the very nature of
existence in the world.
 A theory, which gained prominence in the late 1960s, that focuses on the reader or audience reaction to a particular text,
perhaps more than the text itself. Reader-response criticism can be connected to poststructuralism’s emphasis on the role of the reader in
actively constructing texts rather than passively consuming them. Unlike text-based approaches such as New Criticism, which are
grounded upon some objective meaning already present in the work being examined, reader-response criticism argues that a text has
no meaning before a reader experiences—reads—it. The reader-response critic’s job is to examine the scope and variety of reader
reactions and analyze the ways in which different readers, sometimes called “interpretive communities,” make meaning out of both purely
personal reactions and inherited or culturally conditioned ways of reading. The theory is popular in both the United States and Germany; its
main theorists include Stanley Fish, David Bleich, and Wolfgang Iser.

A. The Structure of Language

 According to Saussure, all languages are governed by their own internal rules that do not mirror or imitate the structure of the world.

 The basic build block of language is the phoneme – the smallest, meaningful (significant) sound in a language. A phoneme can be identified in writing by
enclosing the grapheme – the written symbol that represents the phoneme’s sound – in virgules or diagonal lines.

 Although each phoneme makes a distinct sound that is meaningful and recognizable to speakers of a particular language, in actuality a phoneme is composed
of a family of nearly identical speech sounds called allophones.

 In addition to phonemes, two other major building blocks of language are morpheme, the smallest part of a word that has lexical (derivational) or grammatical
(inflectional) significance, and syntax, the actual arrangement of words in a sentence.

B. Langue and Parole

◦ Saussure makes a distinction between langue and parole.

◦ Langue is the social aspect of language: it is the shared system which we (unconsciously) draw upon as speakers.

◦ Parole is the individual realization of the system in actual instances of language.

◦ The object of linguistic study is the system which underlies any particular human signifying practice, not the individual utterance.

◦ When we examine a poem to discover what system of rules or grammar is being used.
◦ For Saussure, words are not symbols which correspond to referents (symbol=thing), but rather are signs which are made up of 2 parts.

SIGN = signifier– a mark, either written or spoken

signified – a concept (what is thought when the mark is made)

Assumptions
 Borrowing the linguistic vocabulary, theory, and methods from Saussure, structuralists – their studies being variously called structuralism, semiotics,
stylistics, and narratology – believe that codes, signs, and rules govern all human and social and cultural practices, including communication.

 Structuralists want to discover these codes, which they believe give meaning to all our social and cultural customs and behavior.

 The proper study of literature, for the structuralists, involves an inquiry into the conditions surrounding the act of interpretation itself (how literature
conveys meaning), not an in-depth investigation of an individual work. Since an individual work can express only those values and beliefs of the system of
which it is part, structuralists emphasize the system (langue) whereby texts relate to each other, not an examination of an isolated text (parole).

 Of particular interest to the structuralist is “how” a text conveys meaning rather than what meaning is conveyed.

 To the structuralist, how a symbol or any other literary device functions is of chief importance, not how literary devices imitate reality or express feelings.

 In addition to emphasizing the system of literature and not individual texts, structuralism also claims it demystifies literature.

a. By explaining lit as a system of signs encased in a cultural frame that allows that system to operate, a literary work can no longer be considered a
mystical or magical relationship between the author and the reader.

b. All texts are part of the shared system of meaning that is intertextual, not text specific; in other words, all texts refer readers to other texts. Meaning can
therefore be expressed only through this shared system of relations, not in an author’s stated intentions or the reader’s private or public experiences.

A. A.J. Greimas offers three pairs of binary oppositions

Subject/Object - desire, search, or aim

 Sender/Receiver - communication

Helper/Opponent - auxiliary support or hindrance

B. Roland Barthes

 Borrowing and further developing Saussure’s work, Barthes then declares that all language is its own self-enclosed system based upon binary
operations.

 Barthes applies his assumption that meaning develops through difference of all social contexts, including fashion, familial relations, dining, and literature.

 When applied to literature, an individual text is simply a message – a parole – that must be interpreted by using appropriate codes or signs or binary
oppositions that form the basis of the entire system, the langue. Only through recognizing the codes or binary oppositions within the text, says Barthes, can
the message encoded within the text be explained.

C. Structuralist Poetics

 Skilled readers, when faced with the text, seem to know how to make sense of it- to decide what is a possible interpretation and what is not. There seem
to be rules governing the sort of sense one might make of the most apparently bizarre text.

 He sees the structure not in the system underlying the text but in the system underlying the reader’s act of interpretation.

  

 Structuralism presents a certain rigor and objectivity in the analysis of the text but tends to neglect the specificity of actual texts. Writing has no origin
and every individual utterance is preceded by language: in this sense, every text is made up of the “already written”.

 - Barthes’ most famous work, Mythologies (1957), sought to analyze semiologically a whole range of contemporary myths, from
wrestling to advertising, from striptease to Romans in the cinema.

 - His works, from 1960s to early 1970s, proceeded along three main lines: first, to the development of a set of highly formal
analyses of the structures of narrative; second, to the definition of a quasi-Formalist notion of literariness; and third, to the famous
announcement of the death of the author.
 - Authorial death as polemic against the more traditionally humanist view of the writer as the source of literary meaning.

 - The reader is “someone who holds together in a single field all the traces by which the written text is constituted.”

 - For Umberto Eco, it is the “structuralist role of the reader.”

 - The intelligibility is a function of the discourse itself, rather than of any individual reader’s capacities and inerests.