Structuralism and Its Critics

Abstract

Structuralism and Its Critics Anita Moss (bio) Culler, Jonathan . Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics, and the Study of Literature. Cornell University Press, 1975. Graff, Gerald . Literature Against Itself. University of Chicago Press, 1979. Goodheart, Eugene . The Failure of Criticism. Harvard University Press, 1979. Literary criticism has traditionally [End Page 24] concerned itself with essential questions: What is literature? What is its nature and function? What is its relation to culture—a shaping force or a mirror image? What is the writer's relation to the literary text and to the audience? What is the reader's role in completing the work of art? What indeed is the relation between literature and reality? In discussions of the criticism of children's literature at meetings in recent years, we hear some of these questions raised—especially, "What is children's literature?" (The question seems so obvious, yet few of us seem to know how to answer it.) All too often, it seems to me, we hear insistent voices asserting that there must be only one function of the critic of children's literature: to determine what is valuable and lasting and what is ephemeral and trivial. Surely we never want to abdicate that critical role, but I would argue that the criticism of children's literature could be richer (if stranger) than it is, its functions and purposes manifold, not exclusive or simplistic. While we have seen fine critical articles and books on children's literature in recent years, we still see far too many descriptive bibliographies which claim to be criticism. If we believe (as I do) that children's literature occupies a significant place in the traditions of all literature, we owe it to ourselves to explore what is going on in the field of literary criticism, even if we decide to reject it. We need a variety of critical methods. The three books I am discussing here offer some provocative ideas, address some very large and ambitious issues, and make bold gestures. Jonathan Culler's Structuralist Poetics is an amazingly well-informed introduction and analysis of structuralism, a critical method which has enjoyed much vogue in recent years and which has spawned such avant-garde movements as "post-structuralism" and "deconstructionism." Culler traces the origins of structuralism in the linguistic theory of Ferdinand de Saussure and in the analysis of myth by Claude Levi-Strauss, both of whom argued for a new science of "semiology," a method of investigating not only language and literature, but all human cultural activities on the premise that they are comprised of "signifying systems," the elements of which derive meaning in relation to each other and in reference to the system itself, not in reference to reality outside the system. Culler discusses Roland Barthes' famous work, Systeme de la mode, which examines the system of writing about fashion, Levi-Strauss's Mythologiques (according to Culler and others, "the most extensive structural analysis ever undertaken"), Roman Jakobson's attempts to employ the methods of linguistics to analyze poetry, and Greimas's work on structural semantics. Culler's analyses of these works are careful (even tedious), and he clearly reveals problems with all of them, primarily because each one seems concerned only with locating the "binary oppositions" of the text. Culler writes: "One does not simply seek oppositions within a poem but seeks those oppositions upon which the poem seems to set some value" (p. 94). While he is disappointed with the most prominent attempts at the structural analysis of literature, Culler is intrigued with the possibility of designing a "structuralist poetics," an ideal method of the structural analysis of literature. Chapters 6 and 7, "Literary Competence" and "Convention and Naturalization," are especially important. Culler's proposals, I think, may offer some exciting possibilities for the critic of children's literature. Culler suggests that structuralism as a method would not necessarily "discover or assign meanings" or offer interpretations; rather it would be: a poetics which strives to define the conditions of meaning...It would specify how we go about making sense of texts...Just as the speaker of a language has assimilated a complex grammar which enables him to read a series of sounds or letters as...