Structuralism began in France in the 1950s through the work of Claude Levi-Strauss and Roland Barthes. Structuralists believe that cultural elements can only be understood in the context of larger structures or systems they are part of. Structuralism analyzes relationships within cultural systems or structures. The structuralist approach originated from Ferdinand de Saussure's work revolutionizing linguistics by focusing on langue, the system of a language, rather than individual utterances. Saussure viewed language as a system of arbitrary signs and emphasized differentiation within the system. Structuralist literary criticism then applied this structuralist approach to analyze relationships within literary texts and systems.

1. FRENCH STRUCTURALISM

2. Introduction
 Structuralism is an intellectual movement which
began in France in the 1950s and is first seen in the work
of the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss (1908— 2009)
and the literary critic Roland Barthes (1915-1980).
 Structralists believe that things cannot be
understood in isolation - they have to be seen in the
context of the larger structures they are part of.
Elements of culture must be understood in terms of
their relationship to a larger system or "structure.”
 Structuralism is found in all areas of thought and
study. The structuralist mode of reasoning has been
applied in a diverse range of fields, including
anthropology, sociology, psychology, literary
criticism, and architecture. Structuralism is
interdisciplinary.

3. Roots of Structuralism
Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913)
Saussure revolutionized the study of language. Nineteenth-
century linguistics is mainly interested in the history of language
and the origin of individual words. Instead of the usual
historical, diachronic approach – following language through
time – he opted for an ahistorical one. The important thing for
him was how does language work?
Saussure is also different from what grammarians – the
other type of linguist around in Saussure’s time – used to do.
Grammarians wanted to describe the underlying grammatical
rules that we follow when we talk or write. So they analysed
instances of language use – our individual utterances, which
Saussure called paroles (plural) – to get at those rules. But
Saussure is interested in how language as such works – in what
he called langue – and not in the grammatical system of this or
that language.

4.  Language is a system of signs.
 Those signs are arbitrary and are maintained
only by convention. There is no inherent
connection between a sign and what it
designates (the red color and stop).
 A word (sign) links a concept (signified) with a
sound or image (signifier). The relationship
between the signified and the signifier is
arbitrary. The form of words is not determined
by their relationship with what they refer to.
 Saussure traces the origin of the form of words
(linguistic signs) to the principle of
differentiation.

5. Structuralist literary criticism
 It is a type of literary criticism that derives from
structuralism.
 Claude Lévi-Strauss, as a logical consequence of
his work on myths, proposed a search for the
underlying structure of all narratives in all forms of
fiction, including biography and autobiography, travel
literature, and so on.
 Structuralist critics argue for the possibility of
analyzing literary texts systematically and
scientifically.
 Structralists ignore biographical and historical
consideration and stress the study of the text.

6.  A literary structuralist focuses on structures in
"literary" texts.
 Structuralist literary critics link a text with other
literary texts (with texts within the same collection, by
the same author, by the author’s contemporaries,
within the same genre, within the same time period).