Well good morning class!!!
I have been ruminating on structuralism as a theory for some time now. It's a difficult concept to grasp at first, as by definition it defies the inherent chaos of a natural system, but now I believe I see what exactly it contributes to the study of humanity.
In the Bedford Glossary, structuralism is defined as the theory that all of human culture and history can be interpreted as a system of signs. Signs, also defined in the glossary, are things which stand for something else. Isn't this exactly what we're naturally inclined to do? We, the only animal capable of complex language, of creating edifices and machines?
What are these creations of ours but manifestations of our thoughts and feelings? Thoughts and feelings are only mental and physiological impulses which the mind and body use to comprehend the world around them, and signs are used to communicate these impulses to and with others.
Everything humanity has ever created--every scrap of writing, every trinket, every strain of music--has meaning because we, the creator, imbibe these things with meaning. And every single thing ever created has meaning to people besides the creator, even if they don't realize it, even if that meaning is simply a mental comprehension or register of color, harmony, shape or definition.
I know I sound like I'm rambling, but I'm trying to simplify structuralism in the basest and broadest terms possible, because to be specific or particular would be to lose a grasp of the theory as a whole, which in itself is a formidable thing to understand, given the scope of human history and culture.
I have always understood structualism as anything is worth more than the sum of its parts. In otherwords the things that make up a literary work, style, diction, genre etc can often be more insightful than the actual, "message" of the work.
ReplyDeleteWhile I read your post I thought of Locke, it seems he had some pre-structuralist ideas himself. Remember, he wrote that complex ideas were made up of more simple ideas. Like for example, the idea of gold is made up of ideas like shiny, malleable, ductile, color etc. The reason that words have different significations to Locke was because the parts that made up complex ideas meant different things to different people.
So it seems like to Locke, that words are often like a Rorschach tests. There are smaller parts making up a larger whole, and the definition of the whole depends on how one interprets the smaller parts.
I just thought that was kind of interesting, and maybe it would be a nice conversation to have between Locke and the later Structuralist writers that were in this unit