Structural and Poetic Theory: Intention, Meaning and Privilege

Abstract

Now that the post-structuralists have addressed themselves to some of the inconsistencies of the structuralists, rigorously following through on the consequences of studying signs without referents, this appears an appropriate time to examine the difficulties of applying structural theory to poetry. Language theory, in the process of de-hallowing and de-privileging the literary object, has illuminated some resistant qualities of poetry that still need close attention. Questions of intention, meaning, and privilege remain live issues, and these are the issues I propose to discuss here. It should not be surprising that current critical theories fail to match traditional expectations of the role of the poem in the world. It is regularly necessary to adjust expectations of various phenomena in our culture in response to altering critical perspectives and new paradigms. But current theory has provoked a crisis of recognition in the groves of academe, where many points of difference exist between a traditional approach to a literary of and newer methods of reading a text. More traditional critics may fear a structuralist approach because they fear the dehumanizing, the explicit or implicit elimination of the subjective element that occurs in all structuralist readings of literature. Perhaps they may also fear the overthrow of bourgeois assumptions that creativity resides only in priapic, ejaculatory exercises of the kind problematized by Foucault and Derrida. And these fears are justified. The structuralists and poststructuralists have de-humanized, in fact de-sexed, the of to the level of text, and in the process they have assigned the Romanticized, idealized author of the work of art a position that is of little consequence, while appropriating for the critic a function that is more difficult, more uncomfortable, more independent, in some ways more exclusive and quirky than he or she has hitherto needed to fulfill. What, then, has been this critic's new function, and how has it impinged on the study of poetry? In general, structuralism proposed to study the structural codes that enable certain social products to achieve their designated ends. This study of structural codes or conventions was intended as descriptive, not interpretive. The discovery of a significant abstract or ethical truth has not been the Lynette McGrath is normally Professor of English and Coordinator of Women's Studies at West Chester University. This year she is Visiting Professor of Women's Studies at the University of New Hampshire. She is presently co-authoring a book to be titled Alternative Voices: Toward a Paradigm of Wholenessa work on the epistemology of academic disciplines and the effect of feminist epistemology.