Ammara Tariq, a student of English Literature and Linguistics.

1. Structuralism
A method of interpretation and analysis of
aspects of human cognition, behavoiur,
culture and experience which focuses on
relationship of contrast between elements in
a conceptual system. It works to uncover the
structures that under lie all the things that
human do, think, perceive and feel.

2. Beginning
• It started in 1950 .
• Traced in Strauss
• Structuralism was imported into
Britain mainly in the 1970s and
attained widespread influence
throughout the 1980s.

3. • It is the belief that things
cannot be understood in
isolation - they have to be seen
in the context of the larger
structures they are part of.

4. • The structures are those imposed
by our way of perceiving the
world and organizing experience,
rather than objective entities
already existing in the external
world.

5. • It follows from this that meaning or
significance isn't a kind of core or
essence inside things: rather,
meaning is always outside. Meaning
is always an attribute of things, in
the literal sense that meanings are
attributed to the things by the
human mind, not contained within
them.

6. Imagine a poem, Donne's 'Good
Morrow',
as structuralist it would be insisted
that it can only be understood if we
first have a clear notion of the
genre which it parodies and
challenges.

7. • In case of Donne's poem the
relevant genre is the alba or 'dawn
song', a poetic form dating from
the twelfth century in which
lovers lament the approach of
daybreak because it means that
they must part.

8. • But the alba, in turn, can hardly be
understood without some notion of
the concept of courtly love, and,
further, the alba, being a poem,
presupposes a knowledge of what is
entailed in the conventionalised form
as utterance known as poetry.

9. • Structuralist 'approach' to it is actually taking
you away from the text, and into large and
comparatively abstract questions of genre,
history, and philosophy, rather than closer and
closer to it, as the Anglo-American tradition
demands.

10. • For structuralism, the world as we
know it consists of two fundamental
levels— one visible, the other
invisible. The visible world consists
of what might be called surface
phenomena: all the countless objects,
activities, and behaviors we observe,
participate in, and interact with every
day.

11. • The invisible world consists of the
structures that underlie and organize all
of these phenomena so that we can make
sense of them. For example, the English
language consists of over a million
words, each of which can be pronounced
in any number of different ways by
different speakers, resulting in millions of
different utterances of indi- vidual words.

12. THE END