A Tentative Analysis of the Linguistic Roots of Structuralist Literary Criticism — From a Semiotic Interdisciplinary Perspective

Abstract

Abstract As a revolt against the traditional extrinsic approaches to literature, structuralist literary criticism flourished as an important literary movement in the 1950s and 1960s. However, its difficulties cannot be ignored. The failure of structuralist literary criticism can be found deeply rooted in structural linguistics. In the European tradition of semiology, structuralism is equated with semiotics, as is evidenced in Terence Hawkes’ Structuralism and Semiotics. Guided by the spirit of semiotic interdisciplinarity, the present paper makes an interdisciplinary investigation into the linguistic roots of structuralist literary criticism. First of all, the concept of “a closed system,” initially established by Ferdinand de Saussure in his Course in General Linguistics, occupies a predominant position in structuralist criticism. Secondly, structuralist literary criticism borrows the principle of digging various levels of structures from structural linguistics. Thirdly, the typical notion of relations in structural linguistics is also widely used in structuralist literary analysis. Probing into the linguistic roots of structuralist criticism helps to make clear the cause of the failure of structuralist criticism.