literature: Method of Structuralism approach

STRUCTULALISM APPROACH

Structuralism is an intellectual movement that developed in France in the 1950s and 1960s, in which human culture is analysed semiotically (i.e., as a system of signs). Methodologically, it analyzes large-scale systems by examining the relations and functions of the smallest constituent elements of such systems, which range from human languages and cultural practices to folk tales and literary texts.

Structuralism originated in the linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure and the Prague and Moscow schools. The term "structuralism" itself appeared in the works of French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, and gave rise, in France, to the "structuralist movement," Structuralism is closely related to semiotics. The most important initial work in 1949 Elementary Structures of Kinship by Claude Lévi-Strauss's. Structuralism rejected the concept of human freedom and choice and focused instead on the way that human behavior is determined by various structures. In Elementary Structures he examined kinship systems from a structural point of view and demonstrated how apparently different social organizations were in fact different permutations of a few basic kinship structures. In the late 1950s he published Structural Anthropology, a collection of essays outlining his program for structuralism. By the early 1960s structuralism as a movement was coming into its own and some believed that it offered a single unified approach to human life that would embrace all disciplines. Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida focused on how structuralism could be applied to literature. Blending Freud and De Saussure, the French (post)structuralist Jacques Lacan applied structuralism to psychoanalysis and, in a different way, Jean Piaget applied structuralism to the study of psychology. Michel Foucault's was write The Order of Things examined the history of science to study how structures of epistemology, or episteme, shaped the way in which people imagined knowledge and knowing (though Foucault would later explicitly deny affiliation with the structuralist movement).

The Figures and Concepts of Structuralism

Claude Lévi-Strauss

            Basic concept :

in structuralism was thought that a variety of social activities and results, such as fairy tales, ceremonies, kinship systems and patterns of shelter, clothing,  it can formally be regarded as languages accurately represents the sign and symbol that conveys specific message. Therefore there is order and repeatability (regularities) in that various phenomena.

Tzvetan Todorov

            Basic concept:

            Three aspect in structiralism

            1. Sintaksis aspect

                The elements that have a relationship syntagmatic / ins praesentia (comes along)

            2. Semantik aspect

                        The elements that have connection  paradigmatic / in absentia

            3. Verbal aspect

                        Telling