Structuralism, American Studies, and the Humanities

Abstract

SO WHAT ABOUT STRUCTURALISM? A GREAT DEAL OF INK HAS BEEN COMmitted, especially in French, in search of a definition-without notable success. Access to structuralism still depends on anthologies representing a diversity of thinkers or on secondary surveys which must scurry back and forth among these same figures, some of whom deny that they are structuralists. The lack of a concise definition follows from the inescapable fact that structuralism is less a school of thought than a habit of mind or, better, a way of focusing the mind. The recurrent touchstone concepts of structuralist thinking are: binary oppositions as basic to thought on any subject, primary emphasis on synchronous functioning of systems as opposed to diachronic unfolding through time, the final importance of paradigms over syntagms. Through such emphases, all derived from the study of language, structuralism generates a significant reorientation of the intellectual procedures traditional in or at least typical of the Western, especially the AngloAmerican tradition. The reception of structuralism in the United States has been hampered by two major factors: prior uses of the term structure and the close association of structuralism with France and French intellectual styles. The first source of confusion resides in well-established habits of analysis in a wide variety of disciplines since the beginning of the century. As of 1968 Jean Piaget tried to preserve this earlier sense of structural study by reviewing the research into structures, particularly feedback mechanisms, in a wide variety of scientific and humanistic disciplines. Piaget's own work is typical of the positivist orientation of earlier study of