Structuralist Studies Research Articles

A semântica histórica: um campo abandonado da lingüística?

A definition of the field of semantics is attempted, approaching its development from the earliest studies, in connection with those of etymology as well as with those of classical grammar. Reasons are given for the prevalence of the lexical approach in traditional semantics, and the question of the referent, excluded in structuralist studies but reintroduced in contemporary theories, is also taken into account. An approximation with classical semantics is arrived at from the exams of the most significant contemporary trends, with emphasis on prototype theory as part of cognitive linguistics. Evolutionary paths are seen as based on encyclopedic knowledge as well as on the human ability of categorization. The concern of classical semantics with the lexicon and with polysemy is reconsidered and situated within the communicative function of language.

Rewriting Melodrama: The Hidden Paradigm in Modern Spanish Theater by Wadda C. Ríos-Font

436Comparative Drama Wadda C. Ríos-Font. Rewriting Melodrama: The Hidden Paradigm in Modern Spanish Theater. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1997. Pp. xv + 198. $36.50. The task Wadda C. Ríos-Font undertakes in Rewriting Melodrama is almost encyclopedic. Not content with defining the formula of Spanish melodrama and tracing its origins, she attempts to prove its veiled presence —previously virtually undetected—in the drama of the second half ofthe nineteenth century. The author achieves these goals with uneven success. When she tracks the multiple historical uses of the term "melodrama" in Spanish literature, she does so with systematic zeal. This dry and diachronic glide through the plots of more than a hundred melodramas is, paradoxically, one of the major attractions of the work. The extensive survey results in a definition for the Spanish melodramatic formula, invented by Echegaray, which, eschewing the traditional obligatory combination ofmusic and speech, presents instead fixed inventories of sentimental plots, stock characters, and bombastic diction with a moral framework featuring "an emotional clash between virtue and evil." Rios-Font's text includes an attractive examination of melodrama 's modulations in light of documented critical reception. For instance , the survey of Galdos's apologetic attempts to defend his first realist experiments from the critics, his subsequent commercial failure, and the author's final submission to melodramatic forms is convincing and illuminating. However, other aspects ofRios-Font's study are problematic at best. She claims that virtually all of nineteenth century Spanish drama can be explained as variations on the success formula that Echegaray invented (and to which even the most rebellious authors, including Galdos, ended up succumbing for pragmatic reasons). The result of this mimetic tendency is a theater that "worked as a hegemonic force that appropriated the discourse of progress while simultaneously sustaining conventional ideologies." This superficial "appropriation" of forms that conceals traditional contents defines the "theater of impersonation," a term she coins to refer in general to late nineteenth century Spanish melodrama. The theater ofimpersonation is explained as emerging in times ofpolitical instability, when authors felt the need both to adopt attractive progressive positions and to maintain the perspectives of a morally ordered universe. Yet, the difficulty of establishing the actual intention of the authors, moral or otherwise, casts some troubling shadows on the term "impersonation." Ríos-Font justifies the term as follows: in the theater of impersonation "the donning of a mask is . . . not limited to the actors playing certain fictitious characters, but extends to the work itself, which plays the part of something else" (52). Even though the structuralist study of these works in terms of moral archetypes presents certain interest, the task of determining whether impersonations are meant to be progressive but fail to be so, or whether they intend to be only moderate variations Reviews437 on the formula, becomes self-defeating. For example, by portraying strong women who transgress social codes, even if they are finally defeated , authors enable the audience to perceive tensions that may be translated into alternatives. The validity of her notion of the "theater of impersonation" depends on its forceful definition as a failed attempt to depart from the moralizing, conservative formulas of melodramatic norm—rather than, for instance, as products of a transition period, as Hans Robert Jauss implies in his description of melodrama as a "process-like genre." Rewriting Melodrama also incorporates an assumption that dramatists , here depicted as a superior "Other," constitute the only dissenting voices in a conservative era. But their rebelliousness is depicted as, in effect, only a façade: "ultimately their theater worked according to the same traditional principles . . . and it worked as a hegemonic force that appropriated the discourse of progress while simultaneously sustaining conventional ideologies." This introduces us to another troubling aspect of Rios-Font's study: her totalizing vision of a Spanish public which, according to her, rejects ideological transformation and yet demands formal changes dictated by taste. In effect, the pervasive conservative spirit which demands the permanence of moralizing dramatic patterns becomes a ghostly and undefined presence that haunts the premise of the book. What Ríos-Font introduces as the theater of dissent ends up being no more than a formal variation of...

Reinhabiting ‘The Cherry Orchard’: Class and History in Performing Chekhov

Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard is clearly ‘about’ the end of one social order – about time changing and time static. Yet different interpretive communities – academics in journal articles and students in their classrooms, newspaper reviewers, theatre writers like Trevor Griffiths and David Mamet, and theatre directors like Adrian Noble and Richard Eyre – ‘read’ Chekhov's representation of history and class change in different ways. The authors of this study have been exploring these different reading formations in a three-year project funded by the Australian Research Council, ‘Chekhov: in Criticism, Performance, and Reading’. Here – grounding their work in industry ‘readings’ via production study and interviews – they focus on production and performance of The Cherry Orchard, contrasting the Richard Eyre/Trevor Griffiths production of 1977 (reproduced in 1981 for BBC TV) with Adrian Noble's production at the Swan Theatre, Stratford, in 1995. In particular, they discuss the writing, directing, acting, and staging of Chekhov's ‘modernity’ in these productions, suggesting that whereas Noble referenced and yet simultaneously occluded class in his rehearsal style and staging, Griffiths and Eyre worked for a production which not only embodied the intra-class mobility of the Thatcher era in 1981, but also the ‘then’ of Chekhov's own particular engagement with modernity and environment. John Tulloch, Professor of Cultural Studies at Charles Sturt University, New South Wales, is author of Chekhov: a Structuralist Study. Tom Burvill is Associate Professor of Drama and Cultural Studies at Macquarie University, Sydney, where Andrew Hood is a PhD student working on reception cultures.

The Monstered Self: Narrative of Death and Performance in Latin American Fiction (review)

Reviewed by: The Monstered Self: Narrative of Death and Performance in Latin American Fiction Elzbieta Sklodowska Eduardo González . The Monstered Self: Narrative of Death and Performance in Latin American Fiction. Durham: Duke UP, 1992. 275 pp. $ 37.50 cloth. In keeping with the promise of its evocative title, Eduardo González's book explores the predicament of literary subjects who, like Shakespeare's Coriolanus, cannot perform without generating a complex web of stories that turn them into "monstered selves." González's masterly scrutiny of short stories and novels by Borges, Cortázar, Wells, Vargas Llosa and Roa Bastos elucidates the ways in which death, metamorphosis and transfiguration are closely linked to this dual character of performance. Part One, "Myth as Mask," consists of one extensive chapter, which offers a carefully articulated examination of the act of storytelling as a "conflict between individual autonomy and the stereotypes of group solidarity found in magic and ritual." González weaves his analysis of Borges' "El Sur" and "La muerte y la brujula" and H. G. Wells' The Invisible Man into a complex web of overlaps and continuations with Borges' own essays and Walter Benjamin's "The Storyteller" and "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." With remarkable resourcefulness González draws support from varied fields, including psychoanalysis, anthropology, etymology and comparative literature. The insights that result from this sophisticated blend are brought together in a virtuoso study of Vargas Llosa's The Storyteller that closes Part One. The two chapters of Part Two ("Pastoral and Dark Romance") focus on Cortázar's short fiction. By exploring the complex sedimentation of the character's voice in "Cefalea," the first chapter offers a powerful new "take" on the much discussed topic of the fantastic as a textual strategy which subverts the pastoral narrative from within. In contrast to many critical discussions of Córtazar's best-known stories that suffer from a limiting formalistic bias, the readings of "Bestiario," "Final del juego" and "Las armas secretas" benefit from a broader cultural perspective, encompassing psychoanalytical principles, the structuralist study of kinship and self-conscious reflection on the monstrosity of storytelling within literary criticism. In Part Three—focused on Roa Bastos' novel, Yo el Supremo-, González continues unfolding his argument, which "is simply this: in narrative, the need for expressiveness goes hand-in-hand with (and may radically resist) the plain urge to communicate with others." While Part Three attests to the labyrinthine nature of González's style, his interweaving of theory, intertextuality (Finnegans Wake, "The Pardoner's Tale") and textual analysis is illuminating and astute enough to lead us over the most unfamiliar ground. Through his compelling rereading of the Supreme's individual biography and of Paraguay's native myths, religion and collective genealogy, González reiterates and complements his previous meditations on the complexities of storytelling. [End Page 167] The Monstered Self is an exemplary work of scholarship whose relevance goes far beyond the critical horizon of Latin American literary studies. González possesses a remarkable mastery of an impressive theoretical apparatus, which enables him to challenge and engage the reader. By incorporating cross-discplinary insights in the field of Latin American literary criticism and seeking mutual illumination of literature, theory and criticism, The Monstered Self offers enriched understanding of all three. Elzbieta Sklodowska Washington University Copyright © 1994 Purdue Research Foundation

The Revolutionary Mission: American Enterprise in Cuba

HENRY W. CATLIN OF GENERAL ELECTRIC arrived in Cuba in 1922, on a revolutionary mission. Armed with $8 million from a G.E. subsidiary, Catlin acquired most of Cuba's primitive, electrical generating network within eighteen months. Sweeping in behind Catlin came accountants and engineers, the troops of the United States' second industrial revolution. Within a few short years, they transformed the island's generating plants into a modern power network and revamped the work relations of their Cuban labor force. Working and middleclass resistance to these changes generated a wave of popular protest that swept G.E. into the vortex of the Cuban Revolution of 1933. As American corporations set up businesses in every part of the globe at the beginning of this century, they triggered responses that had profound and far-reaching effects on the societies they encountered. Despite an increasingly rich historiography on the rise of modern American corporations, our understanding of their encounters with Third World societies remains rudimentary. Historians have previously traced many of the forces in American society that shaped multinational enterprises. Business and social historians have examined the organizational and technological revolutions that forged these corporations, worker resistance to rationalization of the workplace, and the emergence of the new professional classes as mediators between labor and capital. Studies of multinational corporations have enhanced our understanding of the forces that propelled them overseas and of the corporate culture they carried with them. Yet, aside from structuralist studies of economic development, we know little about the interaction between American multinationals and the societies in which they functioned. This study of the G.E. experience in Cuba addresses some of the basic issues surrounding the effects of globalizing American corporations. It explores the salient features of the culture these companies carried with them and the responses of the Cuban working and middle classes to the activities of a business

Agriculture in recent development theory

This paper is a critical review of recent contributions to the literature on agriculture in development theory. It considers and compares the main lines of advance made within neoclassical, neo-Marxian and structuralist approaches. Recent neo-Marxian and structuralist studies of agrarian development reveal that traditional agriculture is neither stationary nor efficient, that resource allocation cannot be separated from wealth distribution or production organization, that forms of surplus appropriation do not necessarily follow the dictates of efficiency, that the social relations of production may inhibit accumulation and determine the forms of technological change, that the state's role in primitive accumulation is more economic than explicitly coercive/political, and that political and macroeconomic constraints preclude a simple ‘get the prices right’ view of the intersectoral terms of trade. The thrust of these developments is to challenge both neoclassical and some orthodox Marxian formulations of agrarian development issues and add to the insights to be gleaned from a political economy of development.

Advertising and Structuralism The Myth of Formality

The growth of interest among sociologists in cultural forms of power and control has led to a concern with how advertisements communicate ideological messages. Structuralism offers a method by which advertisements can be analysed as complex semiotic structures. By a process of ‘coding’, underlying ideas are transformed into the surface arrangement of ‘signs’ which make up an advertisement. Therefore, the power of advertising lies in its ability to communicate ‘hidden’ ideological messages. To evaluate this approach two structuralist studies of advertising are examined. It is shown that the structuralist method employed in these studies itself rests upon hidden, unexamined assumptions. These assumptions vitiate the aims of the studies because they dissolve the everyday cultural reality of advertisements.

Prophetic Self and the Problem of Voice

G, Thomas Couser. American Autobiography : The Prophetic Mode. Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1979. 222 pp. S. C. Neuman. Gertrude Stein: Autobiography and the Problem of Narration. Victoria, B.C.: University of Victoria, 1979. 74 pp. Autobiography has traditionally been considered a sub-area of history. Memoirs, though taken with a grain of salt, have enriched a diet of documents and statistics. Recently, however, psychological critics, offering to decode autobiographies (as in Jeffrey Mehlman's structuralist study of Proust, Leiris, Sartre and Lévi-Strauss), have led to a revaluation of the genre. Distortions of the past now appear as the special interest—indeed the glory—of the form, rather than as its weakness. Of the two books under review here, one studies the techniques of exploring and exploiting distortion developed by Gertrude Stein, while the other examines American motivation for a special kind of distortion, in specimens of autobiography chosen from three hundred years of experimentation in the mode.

Makers of Meaning: A Structuralist Study of Twain's Tom Sawyer and Nesbit's The Enchanted Castle

Makers of Meaning:A Structuralist Study of Twain's Tom Sawyer and Nesbit's The Enchanted Castle Anita Moss The central questions which structuralists, post-structuralists, and deconstructionists have asked have to do with the ways an active mind makes meaning. How do readers make sense of texts? How do human beings read and decipher the bewildering universe of signs in which they are immersed? How do conventions shape fictions; how do fictions shape our perceptions of reality? To make meaning from literary texts, structuralists argue, a reader must bring them within the modes of discourse which one's culture makes possible. Cultural conventions become after a time so thoroughly internalized that they appear to be natural. A central structuralist notion (deriving from the Russian formalist critics) concerns the force of genre conventions in establishing a reader's expectations, which may or may not be fulfilled by a given text. Central also to structuralist thought is the notion that making meaning results from the interplay of the signifier and the signified, the two components of what Saussure called the "sign." Though they had not heard of structuralism or semiotics, Mark Twain and E. Nesbit were intensely aware of the conventions of literature and of the power those conventions exercised on the minds of children. Both Twain and Nesbit reveal the child readers' attempts to use the conventions of literature in making sense of the world. Tom Sawyer's culture has taught him to live by the letter, not the spirit, of books. When Tom observes Aunt Polly at family worship, her "prayer built from the ground up of solid courses of scriptural quotations, welded together with a thin mortar of originality; and from the summit of this she delivered a grim chapter of the Mosaic Law, as from Sinai."1 Tom's culture encourages him to accept the world of adult authority and rules without question: to obey, to use, to own, but not to think or to create. His culture encourages him to reduce all signs to simplistic, rather than full and rich, ways of making meaning. In Sunday School, he is asked to memorize and to recite endless passages from the Bible, to appropriate lifeless and rigid rules in which there is no room for meaningful "play" between signifier and signified, the field whereby human beings invent new meanings for themselves. To his credit and to the reader's delight, Tom signally fails to comply with these demands for rote learning. He fails to memorize Bible verses at church and he pretends at least to fail to memorize his lessons at school. If he has failed to master the surface substance of these lessons, however, Tom has internalized the method, the system by which his culture reads and makes use of texts. As a reader, Tom is disconcertingly literal-minded. In reading adventure stories and in employing their rules and "conventions" in his play, Tom reveals himself as an expert at the misuse of literature. We often use literary texts to establish our own power and authority over others; to manipulate them, and to make them like us. In his use of superstitious folk rituals, Tom is a stickler, indeed a pedant. He insists upon strict adherence to the rules and does not hesitate to use fallacious arguments to counter Huck's notions on the subject. Living in a community of readers who read and write strictly according to convention, Tom adopts their methods for his own purposes. Apparently Tom has not internalized structures which allow him to recombine experience and conventions in creative and liberating ways. Roland Barthes deplored contemporary French toys because they do not invite the child to "invent" his world.2 So it is with Tom. He is capable only of mechanical manipulation of convention. A voracious reader of adventure and romance, Tom uses the conventions of such literature as rituals for play. In these episodes he reveals that, despite his apparently subversive attitudes towards the major institutions of his society, he has nevertheless appropriated the "deep structures" (if not the surface ones) of his culture. He is authoritarian, arbitrary, and literal-minded in the conduct of this play. When his friends try to...

The Soviet Critique of Sport and Physical Culture

The Soviet critique of sport and physical culture has a Marxist-Leninist basis and emphasizes the utilitarian functions of physical culture within the overall social superstructure. One of its distinguishing features is an ongoing polemic with bourgeoise interpretations of sport and physical culture. Soviet scholars maintain that physical culture developed out of man's conscious desire to train himself for military and labor activity. One of the weaknesses of Soviet scholarship is its failure to examine closely the playful aspects of physical culture. Recent structuralist studies provide a basis for analyzing competitive sport's many complex roles, particularly its spectacular ones. The greatest strengths of the Soviet critique of sport and physical culture are its demonstration of the social character of sport and its stress on the role of sport and physical culture in personality development.

Old Testament Poetry: The Translatable Structure

Translation is notoriously impossible, and yet people persist in doing it, perhaps nowhere so much as in the case of the Bible. And, while prose is generally more translatable than poetry, it is Old Testament poetry that survives the process with peculiar success, by reason of the peculiar poetic form of the original: a system of parallelism, or “rhyming” of ideas rather than sounds. The remarkable degree of overlap of form and content ensures a remarkable degree of accuracy, or transfer of meaning. The field is rich for structuralist studies, in that it offers an exemplary combinatoire, and the psalm structure is a model of totality, transformability, and self-regulation, an “instrument of coherence,” which may in turn constitute a subunit of a larger structure.

An Examination of a Recent Structuralist Interpretation of Genesis Xxxviii

The study of the Old Testament has benefited much from the work of specialists in other disciplines, and it would be rash not to pay careful attention to a claim by a well-known specialist in a different subject to shed new light on any aspect of the life and literature of ancient Israel. The purpose of the present article 1) is to examine the way in which an anthropologist, Professor E. R. Leach has interpreted the story of Judah and Tamar in Genesis xxxviii. In an article entitled Some problems in Genesis VT 25 (1975), pp. 338-61, I argued that the story of Judah and Tamar belonged to the source J 2), and that it originated and first circulated in the eastern Shephelah near Adullam-probably at a time when memories of the settlement of Judah in the region were still fresh. I also said that I intended to discuss the story's raison d'etre in a further article or articles. Before my own view of the chapter is advanced in another article, it seems to me desirable to discuss Leach's new interpretation of Genesis xxxviii, which is of considerable interest to the Old Testament scholar and would be of considerable importance if it could be shown to be true. It is also desirable that his pioneering structuralist study of parts of the Old Testament should be tested by a detailed examination of its treatment of one story.