Preface to the Lyrical Ballads by William Wordsworth: Summary

 The first edition of the 'Lyrical Ballads' was obviously an experimental attempt. Wordsworth was happy to note that it proved to be popular and accessible beyond his expectations. His friends had wanted him to write a preface to the poems as it were of a different kind. They also expected to explain his aims and objectives in the preface. However, Wordsworth was unwilling to write a preface primarily for two reasons: he was little anxious about the responses of the readers to such an elaborate explanatory note. He thought that the readers might look coldly on his arguments. Furthermore, the space offered by a normal preface was too short for an adequate defense of a theory of a new kind of poetry. 

But his poems were so inventive, imaginative and innovative from the works popular at that time. So, the preface became necessary in order to create a new flavor among the readers. The public was accustomed to the inane phraseology and gaudy language (extravagantly ornamental and showy) of Alexander Pope and John Dryden. The readers would find something original and unconventional in the poems of Wordsworth; this new wave required an explanation. 

His chief aim in writing the poems has been to choose incidents and situations from common life and to relate them in a selection of the language really used by men. At the same time there would be a coloring of imagination thrown over ordinary events. So, that would be presented to the mind in an unusual aspects. 


He had chosen humble and rustic life for a number of reasons.

• in it the essential passions of human heart found a free, unstrained, plain and powerful expression. 
•  in rustic life the feelings are simpler, hence are more easily understood and more durable. 
•  in the humble condition the passions of men are closely connected with the beautiful and permanent forms of nature.

Wordsworth used the language of these rustic and humble people, after having purified it of its roughness and other defects. The rustic people live in constant communication with the best objects of nature, from which is derived the best part of language. Their natural surroundings and narrow circle of social intercourse prevent them from acquiring social vanity. The simple language in which they convey their feelings, is more permanent and philosophical than the artificial diction used by the poets of the time. Wordsworth's poems differ from those of his contemporaries because his poems have a worthy purpose - that of enlightening the readers and purifying their affections.

“poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings which takes its origin from emotions recollected in tranquillity” However, worthy and noble poems are produced only when the poet has thought long and deep on the subject matter. Wordsworth considers a poet as a man of more than usual organic sensibility, but also one who has “thought long and deeply”, the poet’s feelings are modified by his thoughts which represent all our past feelings; he becomes capable of connecting on thought with another, in this manner he is able to discover what is really important and worthwhile.

whenever he composes poems, he selects only noble themes and lofty sentiments in a worthy manner. Such poems will have a desirable impact on the readers’ sensibility too. Wordsworth implies that if a poet is always given to noble thoughts and worthy ideas he will never fail to compose poems of a moral and noble note.

In “Lyrical Ballads” Wordsworth adopts the simple language of common men. He has avoided the use of the artificial and hackneyed (conventional) devices of poetic diction used by his early contemporaries. He rarely used personification of abstract ideas figures of speech, antithesis and similar devices. He tried to look at firmly at his subject and used a language which fitted the ideas to be expressed.

Wordsworth maintained and practiced in “Lyrical Ballads” his theory that there is hardly any difference between the language of prose and that of poetry. Even in the best poetry there are passages which have an order of words, which is similar to that found in good prose compositions. The only difference is in the metre, as he puts in the essay “there neither is nor can be any essential difference between the language of prose and the metrical composition”. So, the only difference is that poetry uses metre. Otherwise, the “same human blood circulates through the veins of both. They are relate with each other in their nature, function and appeal”.

Wordsworth is of the opinion that poetry is distinguished by its use of a selection of the language really used by men. Such a selection is made with true taste and feeling so that the language of poetry would be free from the roughness and vulgarity of ordinary life. The addition of metre to it becomes a further source of pleasure. He holds the view that metre and rhyme are not indispensable to poetry. There can exist genuine poetry even without metre. Metre is merely superadded. There is no need for artificial devices and foreign splendor. It is the passion and emotion that matters. A judicial choice of subject would lead to appropriate emotion.

Wordsworth observes that the poet is basically a man speaking to men. He is a person who writes not for his own pleasure but primarily to express his own thoughts and emotions to his readers. He is a person endowed with a more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness than ordinary people. He has a greater knowledge of human beings. He has a greater degree of imagination and so he can feel or react emotionally to events and incidents which he has not directly experienced.

Having a more comprehensive soul, the poet can share the emotional experiences of others. He can identify himself emotionally with others and he can express the feelings and sentiments of others. He has greater amount of zeal and enthusiasm for life than ordinary people. He rejoices in the spirit of life, in the activities of mankind and in Nature at large and takes pleasure in communicating his own joy in life to others. Moreover he has greater readiness and power in expressing what he thinks and feels.


Wordsworth agrees with Aristotle’s concept that poetry is the most philosophic of all writing. The object of poetry is truth, no individual and local, but general and operative. Poetic truth is much higher than the truth of history or philosophy. In fact, poetry is more philosophical than philosophy itself. While history deals merely with particular facts and philosophy, with abstract truths, poetry alone deals both with the particular and the universal. Poetry aims at universal truths and also illustrates them through particular instances and illustrations. It is the mirror of human life and nature. Poetry is guided by sole consideration, namely, that of imparting pleasure to the readers while giving a faithful picture of nature and reality. On the other hand, the historian and the philosopher, function under several obstacles.

Poetry, says Wordsworth is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings which takes its origin from emotions recollected in tranquillity. This definition of poetry gives us an idea of Wordsworth’s poetics. This definition highlights the spontaneity and emotionalism of poetry. He says: “Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge; it is the impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all sciences”. This definition explains how poetry blends passions and knowledge. According to Wordsworth, poetic truth is superior to scientific truth, for it is based on universal facts of life and hence can be appreciated by all. While the scientist makes only a surface study, the poet probes into the inner reality and arrives at the soul of things. As he is a man of fine sensibility, the truth which he discovers is surcharged with his personal emotions. These emotions are recollected in serenity.

Wordsworth affixes an Appendix to his Preface to the Lyrical Ballads to express his views on Poetic diction. In poetic diction Wordsworth could not agree with the poetic grounds of neoclassicism. He wanted poetry to be a medium for expressing the feelings and aspiration of common man in common language. Wordsworth wrote Lyrical Ballads to justify his theory and to see if he could produce pleasure by writing in the language of common man. He says in the preface that his poems were a kind of experiment too knows how far the language of conversation among the middle class and lower class in the society was suited for poetry. And also he stated that his object was to choose incidents and situations from common life and describe them in a language used by men.

The whole wave of Wordsworthian writings, both poetic and critical, was towards the simplification of life. He also makes a fresh supplication to the readers to read his poems with an open mind, and to judge for themselves if what the poet had set out to achieve and had been achieved.

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Formalism for Beginners

 Formalism is an objective method of analyzing a text focusing on the work itself. It examines the inherent poetic devices used in a text. By using an artistically enhanced language, the writer can overcome the common and expected pattern of using a language. It renegotiates the expected patterns through various formal devises and sticks on to the innovative and decorative use of language. 

Form is rather more important than the content. Form is the decorative wrapping of the content. In Formalism the emphasis lies on the presentation of the literary text, how it looks matters rather that what it actually is. In order to intensify the effect of language writers constitute a complete deviation from ordinary language.

Russian formalism mainly studies and evaluates the nature of poetic language. Often associated with the works of Roman Jacobson, Viktor shklovsky, Boris Eicjenbaum and juri Tynyanov. They believe literature in general and poetry in particular have a special function of language. The purpose of Formalistic criticism is to discover some underlying features of language such as Literariness, Defamiliarisation and Forgrounding

The term ‘Defamiliarisation’ was Coined by Viktor Shklovsky in his critical essay " Art as a technique " which means the ability to make something strange and unfamiliar. 

We have over exposes to familiar things, so the purpose of literature is make it new. Or make something strange that is over familiar to you. 

The term ‘Literariness’ was coined by Roman Jacobson.it is concerned with the quality needed to a literary language in order to distinguish literature from other kinds of communication. It marks a complete departure from ordinary language. Literariness is an elevated or special use of everyday language or an artistically enhanced language. He asserts the fact that there is a fundamental opposition between literary language and the language we use in our day to day communication. According to Roman Jacobson: “Literature is an organized violence committed upon ordinary language”
 

poetic language foregrounds its own use, in the sense  poetic language doesn't seek to convey information instead it draws attention to its own utterances to what and how it is saying. Jan Mukarovsky, therefore declared that the function of poetic language consist of the maximum foregrounding of the utterances.

Every literary text is make use of language in such a way that everyday objects could be made to look different, extraordinary or even strange. A literary text represents the world in such a way that ordinary things appear different. This is what captures reader's attention. This process is what Victor Shklovsky termed as defamiliarisation

Fabula and Sjuzet/syuzhet are the significant terms in Russian formalism, associated to narratology,that describes narrative construction. Sjuzet means plot which means the narrative method. According to Viktor shklovsky sjuzet is the defamiliarised form of Fabula(story). 

Fabula is the chronological order of events contained in the story. These terms were first used in this sense by Vladimir Propp and Viktor Shklovsky. 

A story can be made unfamiliar by its reformulation into plot with stunning twists, omissions, diagressions and postponement of important information. The fabula is the raw material of the story. And Sjuzet is the way a story is organized.

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New Criticism for Beginners

 A school of literary criticism that emerged in America and later extended to England from the 1920s onwards. The term ‘New Criticism’ was first used in 1910 by Joel .E. Spingarn, an American literary critic in an address  at Columbia University. The inception of this literary critical movement is attributed to the modernist writers such as T.S Eliot, I. A Richards and  F.R Leavis. It is an intrinsic and objective method of analysing a literary text. And applied to the new stream in critical thought after the American scholar John Crowe Ransom (1888-1974), it was here the foundation of New Criticism was laid with the publication of the book entitled ‘The New Criticism’ (1941).

The merits of the work lies neither in the minds of the writer nor in the responses of the reader, but in the language and the structure of the work itself. The text is more important than the reader and the writer. The New Critics was of the view that the meaning of a text is inseparable from its structure. Thus, they strongly advocated ‘Close Reading’ of the text, every word in a text must be counted. A work should be examined as a linguistic formation in which all the parts are held together by Irony, Paradox, Ambiguity and Tension.

They refused the historical, biographical and comparative approaches, as they felt that these methods erroneously look at the extra textual elements. They underline the fact that an author’s intended meaning is irrelevant to the proper literary analysis; instead, the focus should remain on the text itself. A work can’t be judged or evaluated on the basis of the reader's response to it.

New Criticism shared many common features with Russian formalism. As a school of criticism both focused exclusively on exploring specifically the literary aspect of the text.  And also, unkindly rejected the subjective and biographical interpretations of reading. Both emphasized the text should be regarded as an autonomous entity, by stressing the fact that a literary text has self-sufficient verbal existence. Moreover, both regarded poetry as a special mode of language and argued literary language is connotative. They differed only in their approach. The formalists thought that form was more important than the content. However the New Critics form and content were integrated into each other. As a result of their contradicting principle the Formalists tended to focus on genres and general literary devices, while the New Critics preferred to examine the individual texts.

Some famous figures who belonged to this group of criticism were T.S Eliot, F.R Leavis, I.A Richards, Allen Tate, R.P Blackmur, Robert Penn Warren, Cleanth Brooks, W. K Wimsatt, Monroe Beardsley, Rene Wallek, William Empson and Yvor Winders. New Criticism had a very significant impact upon critical attitudes and played an important role in doing the studies of literature. New Critics emphasized the complex interplay within the text. For them a text is made up of Irony, Paradox, Ambiguity and Tension. So, their primary concern lies on the organic unity of structure and verbal meaning. 

The terms Irony and paradox are associated to Cleanth Brooks. He is well known for his work, "The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the structure of poetry"(1947). The title contains an allusion to the fourth stanza of John Donne's poem 'The Canonization'. He illustrates the terms Irony and Paradox in his celebrated essays “Irony as a principle of structure” and “The language of paradox” respectively. Irony is a literary device in which words are used in such a way that their intended meaning is different from the actual meaning of the words. 

• Brutus is an honourable man (Julius Caesar) 
• Water water everywhere,Nor any drop to drink (The Rime of The Ancient Mariner) 
  

While Paradox refers to self contradictory statements or anomalous juxtaposition of incongruous ideas, which simply means seemingly opposite words or concepts are put together in order to reveal the hidden or unexpected truths. 

• War is peace, freedom is slavery and ignorance is strength  (1984 by George Orwell)
  

• A wise fool. 

The term Ambiguity is associated to William Empson. "Seven Types of Ambiguity" Which was the most influential critical work of twentieth century and was a key foundation work in the formation of the New Criticism school. The term Tension is associated to Allen Tate, he is an American poet, essayist and Poet Laureate as well from 1943- 1944. His essay "Tension in poetry" deals with the Tension as the life of a poem. It reveals Tate's view that a good poem is one in which the Ex-Tension and the In-Tension are in a state of tension. Extension and Intension referred to the denotative and the connotative meanings respectively. 


Thus, New Criticism searches for the meaning within the structure of the text. All these complexities altogether constitute the organic unity of the text. It occupies unusual position in the realm of critical theory and in the field of literary studies as well. It has left a lasting imprint on the way we read and write about literature. 

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MODERN FICTION by VIRGINIA WOOLF summary

 

"life is not a series of gig lamps, symmetrically arranged"

Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), a modern English novelist and critic, well known for her works Jacob's Room (1922), Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927) and A Room of One's Own (1929).

The essay ‘Modern Fiction’ was written in 1919 but published in 1921 in the famous journal ‘The common reader and critical method’. It acts as a manifesto for modern fiction to express whatever they feel, not what society or publisher want them to write. As far as she is concerned one should write what inspires them and not to follow any special method. She believed that Writers are constrained by the publishing business, and society dictates how literature should be written. Woolf believed it is a writer’s Job to write the complexities in life and the unknown.

‘Modern fiction’ is one of the most path breaking treatises in criticism which marks a clear break of modern fiction from the Victorian tradition. At the outset she estimates the progress of the novel from its inception. In the 18thCentury, according to Woolf, the earlier novelists really did what they actually could within their limited means. With their simple tools and primitive materials, it might be said “Fielding did well and Jane Austen even better”. Thus, she evaluates the trend of modern novel, and attacks certain writers who still follows the traditional method. Novel as the term itself suggests, supposed to be something new not mere an improvement. She Criticises H.G. Wells, Arnold Benett, John Galsworthy of writing about unimportant things and called them materialists. She remarks that, they hadn’t put life into their novels. They are mainly concerned with the body, not the soul of the novel.  This is particularly because they are all materialists and are concerned with fixities not with movements. But Mr. Benett is perhaps the worst culprit of the three, in as much as he is by far the best workman. He can make a book so well constructed but life escapes from it. She suggests that it would be better for literature to turn their backs on them.

While Woolf criticizes these three authors, She praises and appreciates the remarkable and innovative approaches of Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conard, William Henry Hudson, James Joyce and Anton Chekhov. She praises them for their experimental attempt. This group of writers she name spiritualists, mainly to James Joyce. As a typical modern novelists and critic Mrs. Woolf advises the modern novelists to look within and see what life is like then write about it. “look within and life, an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impressions- trivial, fantastic, evanescent or engraved with the sharpness of the steel”. Thus, she strongly advocates to portray the mind within the pages, it seems, is very far being like this. “life is not a series of gig lamps, symmetrically arranged. Life is a luminous halo (bright circle of light), a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of the consciousness to the end” .Life for Virginia Woolf is not fixed, but a changing process. It is a flux and “ incessant showering of innumerable atoms”. It is the duty of novelist to convey these sensation and impressions.

There should be no limitations or conventions. A writer is indeed a free man and not a slave, he should write what he chose, not what he must. Modernism in general challenged to step away from the traditional and write in a way that they can express their visions. The job of the writer is to write. There should not be any set of rules that an author has to follow.

When it comes to the proper stuff of fiction. She says : “The proper stuff of fiction does not exist, anything can be a proper stuff of fiction”.

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Structuralism for beginners

 Structuralism is an intellectual movement given to a wide range of discourses that study underlying structures of language. Structuralism concerns with meaning but not absolute meaning, rather it is a process of obtaining meaning. How we get meaning is more important than what the meaning is. In Europe it was largely based on the principles laid down by Ferdinand de Saussure, and in America it was associated with the approach known as Bloomfieldean.

The term 'Structuralism' stands for a school of thought that developed in the 1960s in France in the wake of Claude Levi Strauss (French anthropologist), he attempted to discover the objective meaning of human culture. Its essence is the belief that things can’t be understood in isolation. Therefore as a school of thought structuralism cannot be reduced to a single movement or trend. rather it had strong impact on many disciplines during the entire twentieth century.

The 20th century scholarship was based on the principle that our knowledge of the world will not be complete unless we arrive at the structure (internal patterns) of the system, i.e. the relationship between the members of the system. Structuralism believes that the individual phenomena of human experience exist but are intelligible through their interconnections and not in isolation.

The foundational principles of structuralism were based on the lecture notes of the great Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure entitled Course in general linguistics. The general methodological principles of Saussure are as follows.

Structural linguistics

Structural linguistics was developed by Ferdinand de Saussure between 1913 and 1915. It looks for the rules and the fundamentals of language and govern how it functions: it looks for the structure.

In order to differentiate between the structure that governs language and the millions of individual utterances that are its surface phenomena, Saussure called the structure of language langue (the French word for language), and he called the individual utterances that occur when we speak parole (the French word for speech).

While making distinctions between the linguistic system and its actual manifestations, we arrive at the crucial opposition between langue and parole.

Langue is the system or structure of a language whereas parole is the activity of speaking in a language or actual speech. According to Saussure, within the whole field of linguistic activity (language), we should distinguish between the language system (langue) and speaking or writing the language parole).

Langue - as language structure which consists of vocabulary, principles of construction, idioms, rules of pronunciation, etc.

parole-as language, both speech or writing used in context.

The components of a structure are not merely a collection of independent items: they form a working unit because they exist in relation to one another. They interact and we are able to perceive those components, as Saussure noted in terms of the structure of language, only because we perceive their difference from one another. Difference simply means that our ability to identify an entity (such as an object, a concept, or a sound) is based on the difference we perceive between it and all other entities. For example, if we believed that all objects were the same color, we wouldn’t need the word red (or blue or green) at all. Red is red only because we perceive it to be different from blue and green. According to structuralism, the human mind perceives difference most readily in terms of opposites, which structuralists call binary oppositions: two ideas, directly opposed, each of which we understand by means of its opposition to the other. For example, we understand up as the opposite of down, female as the opposite of male, good as the opposite of evil, black as the opposite of white, and so on.

Saussure argued that words do not simply refer to objects in the world for which they stand. Instead, a word is a linguistic sign consisting, like the two sides of a coin, of two inseparable parts: signifier + signified. A signifier is a “sound-image” (a mental imprint of a linguistic sound); the signified is the concept to which the signifier refers. Thus, a word is not merely a sound-image (signifier), nor is it merely a concept (signified). A sound-image becomes a word only when it is linked with a concept. Furthermore, the relationship between signifier and signified, Saussure observed, is arbitrary: there is no necessary connection between a given sound-image and the concept to which it refers. There is no reason why the concept of a tree should be represented by the sound-image “tree”. The relationship between signifier and signified is merely a matter of social convention: it’s whatever the community using it says it is.

Structuralism is not an interpretative theory; it looks for the grammar of literature and its poetics (the art of writing). The individual things can be understood in the context of larger structures only. Thus literature is considered as a part of culture.

Structuralism can be regarded as a developed version of Formalism, the former connects a particular work with the works of similar structures, as it examines all kinds of underlying structures. While the latter, is primarily an intrinsic approach to a work of art and interprets a text by focusing on its inherent features by rejecting all the extraneous influences.

As a literary theory Structuralism relates a literary text to a larger structure, it looks for inter-textual connection, similar patterns and generic conventions. Saussure emphasized the facts that meanings of words are relational. To apply structuralism means to relate everything in order to generate a complete meaning.


Language constitutes our world and shapes our perception; this notion is known as Linguistic Turn of twentieth century (the meaning or idea is constructed through language). Saussure’s view implies that we build up an understanding of our world by means of language and view of the world through language.

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Structuralist Narratology

 Narratology refers to the understanding of a narrative structure in a work. The term was coined by Tzvetan Todorov, but modern narratology is agreed to have begun with the Russian Formalists particularly Vladimir Propp and Mikhail Bakhtin.

There is a deep connection between structuralism and what is called narratology. While structuralists are concerned with how language constructs meaning, narratologists are concerned with how language constructs meaning within stories. In particular, they are concerned with the patterns that exist across different stories.

 

The ideas developed here are similar to those developed by new critics for example, Jonathan Culler is a well-known narratologist, whose Structuralist Poetics (1975) and The Pursuit of Signs (1981) examine how communities of readers construct and follow particular ‘competences’ – understandings of sets of rules for reading, that limit and define the meaning of a text.

 

 

The notion that there is a distinction between the idea of a story and how events are ordered in its telling (plot) is shared by formalist and narratological thinking. Consider, for example, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847), which begins not at the beginning of the events it recounts but midway through, or Henry James’s novella The Turn of the Screw (1898), H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895), Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) or Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899), all of which begin at the middle (in medias res). Narratologists ask, how do these orderings shape meaning?

Structuralists want to know not so much what kind of literariness is at work but what the root meaning of that literariness is. This concern developed into a preoccupation with myth, as the origin of the founding structures of language. Barthes’s Mythologies (1957) argues that myth is a specific type of language with its own rules. While myth functions according to Saussure’s theory of the sign, Barthes suggests that it functions with an additional layer of meaning, which draws the audience away from the literal image and towards a greater, symbolic function. This study of myth is also the central focus of the anthropologist Lévi-Strauss. In his study of myth, Lévi-Strauss returns to formalist ideas about story (fabula) and plot (sjuzet). The story is the actual sequence of events as they have occurred, and is merely raw material for artistic work. Plot is the artistic representation of these events, it may employ repetition, reordering and juxtapositions to heighten literary effect. In particular, he draws on the work of Vladimir Propp (1895–1970), whose The Morphology of the Folktale was first published in Russian in 1928 but not translated into English until 1958 in the wake of structuralist activity.

 

Vladimir Propp analyses the folk tale to formulate the principles of narrative theory. Propp argued that every character in a folk tale’s plot had a specific function. Further all fairy tales can be reduced to a set of seven characters who generate the entire plot through their various relationships and actions. These characters are: hero, false hero, villain, helper, princess, her father and dispatcher. These characters are involved in 31 basic functions including struggle, victory, return, rescue, violations, trickery, departure of the hero, recognition, punishment and wedding. All plots are made up of these characters and actions, in varying combinations and proportions.

 

Influenced by Propp’s work as well as the work of Jakobson, Lévi-Strauss in his 1958 work Structural Anthropology develops the idea of mythemes: the central elements shared between myths and passed down through cultures.He argues that myths have meaning only in relation to other myths in the same myth sequence.

 

This kind of theory has been particularly influential in the study of popular literatures, which often have more generalizable features than more complex literary fictions. Later structuralist narratologists, such as Tzvetan Todorov and Gérard Genette, refine and complicate Propp’s somewhat simplistic structure. Todorov, for example, provides a more complex set of functions than Propp in his attempts to find a formula, not just for folktale but for narrative in general. Unlike Propp, he allows for the reordering of elements and for more complex embedding of plot elements, such as through the use of stories within stories. Genette, meanwhile, moves beyond the concern for function to consider how the tale is told, distinguishing between mimesis (the presentation of events as if they are happening, with action and direct speech) and diegesis (the narrator telling the story). However, it would be wrong to assume that all narratives are either mimetic or diegetic. Most narratives combine showing and telling. For example, descriptions of setting, characters and events might be direct and mimetic. Mimesis shows rather than tells, by means of action that is enacted. Diegesis is the telling of a story by a narrator.

 In our own literary analysis, we can consider how a text moves between these two modes and for what purpose, giving emphasis to particular events through the slow unfolding of mimesis or reducing the impact of particular aspects of the story through diegesis.

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Structuralist Criticism

 

Structuralist criticism was emerged in the 1960s, is a study of language that focuses not on the communicative function of language, but on examining the conditions that allow language and meaning to derive. Structuralist criticism examines how the elements of language are organised in order to produce the effect it has.

The principles of structuralism can be traced to work of the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913), who pointed out that language was not a random collection of words, but one that contained a structured system of relationships. Saussure conveyed that a word was a linguistic sign and has two interrelated sides to it- the signifier and the signified. The signifier refers to the sound image or the word (for example the word 'dog'); the signified is the concept which is being referred by the signifier (that is, the actual dog itself). The relationship between the signifier and the signified is very  arbitrary (the letters that form the written word 'dog' or the sounds that constitute the spoken word 'dog' have no real connection to the living animal they represent), but they work together to create meaning. But the meaning of signifier can only be understood in relation to other signifiers (we know what 'spoon' signifies something, because we can differentiate it from a 'fork' or a 'knife'). Signs are often understood in terms of binary opposites such as light in contrast to dark, strong in contrast to weak, realist in contrast to romantic and capitalist in contrast to socialist. Thus we see that there exists a vast and complex system of interrelated signs which derive their meaning based on their differences and relation to one another. Language consists of artificial constructs,  a system of structures that mediates between us and external reality.

Discovering the system of structures that create meaning in literature was the main focus of the structuralist school of criticism. Structuralist critics try to examine how these artificial constructs work. They do not try to interpret the meaning of an individual work or judge it. They are more interested in language and grammar, and focus on the narrative structures. They preferred the word ‘text’ to ‘work’ to emphasize their point that all literature was subject to a set of cords rather than being a unique product of author's mind. They also questioned the belief that the text was a representation of reality as they believed that all signification was arbitrary.


The most important figures connected with this school of thought are Claude Levi Strauss, Lucien Goldmann, Roland Barthes, Louis Althusser and Jonathan Culler.

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What is literary theory?

 

Literary theory can be described as the application of ideas to literature. A set of tools which are useful not only for interpretation of literature, but also for interrogating much wider questions. Literary theory in fact consists of any ideas that can shape literary analysis. It is the process of looking outside the text for different meaning.

Criticism is the process of analysing and judging of literature, while theories are the tools to facilitate that interpretation. Indeed, literary theory fosters new avenues into the text. If the student has the passion for the ideas, there comes the best use of theory. It’s a unique way of looking at things; each school offers us a different and particular way to think about a literary text. It can give us a perspective on what a literary text is, on the issues it contains, and the way it is written.

Literary theories are not all the same. Early theories, such as formalism and structuralism, are very engaged with the nature of language and, even more than this, with reading practices. Other theories, such as poststructuralism and postcolonial theory, often discuss literature directly but within the context of a wider range of concerns. Some literary theory, such as psychoanalytic and Marxist theory, is based in another discipline which does not often explicitly address literature. Thus, literary theory is about the application of all the possible ideas to literature.

Literary theory is, in essence, any ideas, whether directed towards literature or not, that can shape literary analysis. You will also find usages of the word ‘theory’ in other disciplines. For example, cultural theory is the theory that enables us to ask questions about culture, while film theory may or may not explicitly discuss film, but is regardless useful for its interpretation.

Imagine you are standing in the centre of a circular room, with a whole set of doors laid out around you. You have the text in hand. And each doorway opens on to a new and illuminating field of knowledge that can change how you think about what you have read. You can open one door, or many of them. The choice is yours. Put the knowledge you gain together with your own interpretation, however, and you have a unique and potentially fascinating response.

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