Ask and you shall receive: I know all the kids today have been clamoring for an overview of literary theory post-1940. They practically won't shut up about it. Thus, as a public service, I present to you...

Formalism, Structuralism, and Post-Structuralism in Under 1000 Words

Formalism
The names to know: Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren

I’m not going to talk about Formalism much, mostly because you already know it. If you’ve taken an English class in high school or college, then you know Formalism. Maybe you know it better as New Criticism. Or maybe you know it better as “close reading.” But it’s all the same thing: you’re focused only on the text. Not the author, not the historical context, just the work itself. What does the text mean? What makes it a “good” text or a “bad” text? Look for things like symbolism, ambiguity, irony, repetition, theme. If you’ve written an English paper, you’ve probably used a Formalist approach to literature.

Structuralism
The names to know: Ferdinand de Saussure, Tzvetan Todorov, Roland Barthes

Language. Structuralism is all about language. Ferdinand de Saussure looks at how we have a series of signifiers and signifieds. Signifiers are the words/sounds we use to represent signifieds, the objects/concepts we’re trying to relate. So, the combined letters c-a-t are the socially-agreed-upon signifier for the signified “cat.” Although these signifieds and signifiers are arbitrary (the idea of “cat” could just as easily have been represented by “dog” or “pizza” or “disodama”), they are bound together like two sides of the same coin. Thus, words (and, more importantly, the act of naming) construct our reality. To structuralists, there is no objective reality. We build our own perception of reality through words. Example time: Let’s say we didn’t have the terms “light blue” and “dark blue” to describe colors, we only had “blue.” As a result, if two people were wearing different shades of blue, we wouldn’t perceive them to be different because they would both just be “blue.” The fact that we can differentiate the two colors is solely because we have a different vocabulary for the shades of blue. Crazy, right? But it gets better. To de Saussure, the way we get any sort of meaning out of words/sounds is by differentiating them from what they’re not. When I wrote “cat,” you knew it was “cat” because it wasn’t “car” or “cab” or “can.” Think of it this way: when you have trouble reading someone’s handwriting, it’s because you can’t differentiate the letters. A “c” might look like an “e” or an “a” might look like an “o” or a “t” might look like an “l.” Whatever. In order to figure out what something is, you have to first determine what it is not.

That’s the semiotics side of structuralism. Todorov and Barthes expand the approach to literature. They were interested in looking at a piece of literature (or a series of works) and determining what structural elements it contained. By recognizing these devices, you can form conventions. So, for example: Quantum Leap. (What is this, 1990? Yes.) Every episode opens with Sam leaping into a new character. He tries to figure out the situation, then says “Oh boy.” Al comes in, gives Sam some info. Sam tries to change history. Something gets in his way and it looks like he’ll be stuck in the past. Al and Sam team up and get through the situation. Sam leaps into a new character. He says “Oh boy” and that’s that. Knowing this formula is comforting. If I watch an episode of Quantum Leap, I don’t have to worry about Sam dying or getting stuck in the past or making these people’s lives worse. The same thing applies to detective novels or romantic-comedies or punk music. There’s an order, a system. Everything falls into place. But if something doesn’t quite fit the mold (like, say, Arrested Development, which isn’t a typical episodic sitcom), we can create a new sub-genre (single-camera comedy?) by whittling it down from what it’s not. Know the convention, you know the rules. You know the rules, you can break them.

Post-structuralism/Deconstruction
The names to know: Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes

Post-modern literature plays on the idea of messing with form, messing with conventions. The author as a character. The text realizing it’s a text. Structuralism was all about having things in order. Post-structuralism says there is no order, there is no system. Derrida argues this by stating that language is infinite. Don’t know the definition of a word? Look it up in the dictionary. But what do you find? More words to describe a word. And you can look up those words, only to find more words. There is no beginning and there is no end. Structuralists have closure (once you fuse the signified and the signifier together, there’s a complete system), but post-structuralists deconstruct that image. They unravel words. They say that concepts like “God” or “fate” or “time” –- some of the big-ticket items that we associate with a beginning or end or something outside of us –- aren’t really anything. They’re just socially-indoctrinated concepts that we’ve been told are “the answer.” But “God” or “fate” is just as susceptible to unraveling as anything else.

As a result, since there is no beginning or end, there is nothing original. Barthes is merely one person to argue that anything you create today has already been created before. (Part of this mindset began with the structuralists –- by inspecting the commonalities among several works, it highlights the lack of originality.) Everything is just a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy with no origin. For instance, we like to distinguish between someone saying “I love you” in a movie and “I love you” in real-life. In the movies, we can assume it’s fake, it’s not real. But even saying “I love you” in real-life isn’t original. In fact, it’s actually kind of cliché. But all words are cliché. There isn’t such a thing as an “original” word. The only reason you can decipher anything that I’ve written so far is because each of the individual signifiers I’ve decided to type out has been around long enough to coalesce into the language we use today. Nothing is original.


Whew. I’m sure I omitted a ton of important information and probably got some things wrong, but that’s it in a nutshell. Or 999 words.