THE MERITS AND DEMERITS OF STRUCTURALISM AND POST-STRUCTURALISM AS CRITICAL CONCEPTS ACCORDING TO TERRY EAGLETON

THE MERITS AND DEMERITS OF STRUCTURALISM AND POST-STRUCTURALISM AS CRITICAL CONCEPTS ACCORDING TO TERRY EAGLETON

According to Mary Klages in his work Literary Theory: A guide for the perplexed, Structuralism is a way of thinking that words to find the fundamental basic units or elements of which anything is made. Structuralism appears in a variety of fields, including anthropology, linguistics, mathematics, and literary and cultural criticism. Pramod k. Nayar also pointed out in his work Contemporary Literary Theory and Cultural Theory: From Structuralism to Ecocriticism that structuralism looks at the relationship between the various elements within the self-contained, well-organized structure of a text in order to understand the ways by which the text produces meaning. It focuses on the form of a text by looking at elements like voice, character, setting, and their combination. 

                                    In the study of Structuralism, the world which we see, the visible world is called surface phenomena and individual words and all the different ways of people’s pronouncing them is called individual linguistic surface phenomena. Lois Tyson observes in the study of structuralism that the world we live in consist of innumerable events and objects that is innumerable surface phenomena. In Critical theory today: user friendly guide, Lois Tyson writes that structuralism assumes that all surface phenomena belong to some structural system, whether or not we are consciously aware of what the system is.

                                                                                        Terry Eagleton mentions in his work Literary Theory: An Introduction, the merits and demerits of structuralism and post-structuralism. He comments on the theory of Frye’s narrative.

The advantage of Frye’s theory, then, is that it keeps literature untainted by history in New critical fashion, viewing it as an enclosed ecological recycling of texts, but unlike New criticism finds in literature a substitute history, with all the global span and collective structures of history itself.¹

In this sentence, Eagleton says about the merits of structuralism. We all know that structuralism study focuses on the systematic structure and elements. He says that Frye’s theory of narrative is based on the signifier and signified concept. Eagleton suggest to him that the narrative notion of a story does not belong totally to structuralism view. 

Literature is not a way of knowing reality but a kind of collective utopian dreaming which has gone on throughout history, an expression of those fundamental human desires which have given rise to civilization itself, but which are never fully satisfied there.²  

As structuralist say that the study of literature is the study of forms which create a system. The systematic study of literature or a study of a text is gift of structuralism. Ferdinand De Saussure also writes in his work “The object of study”, that language performs more than the thinking element of human consciousness ‘cogito’. Structuralism tells us that language is controlling human beings without their conception. Structuralism becomes the study of language and signifier/signified therefore it is called study of semiotics.  

Eagleton observes the mistake of Frye and that is “The only mistake, Frye informs us, is that of the revolutionary, who naively misinterprets myths of freedom as historically realizable goals.”

                                                                

Structuralism, as the term suggests, is concerned with structures, and more particularly with examining the general laws by which they work. It also like Frye tends to reduce individual phenomena to mere instances of such laws. But structuralism proper contains a distinctive doctrine which is not to be found in Frye: the belief that the individual units of any system have meaning only by virtue of their relations to one another.³

In the above passage, Eagleton himself says that structuralism is a study of general laws. This is demerit of structuralism. It never goes beyond the structure of a study. Structuralism is the study of general laws and forms which study the relation between its general law and system.

As long as the structure of relations between the units is preserved, it does not matter which items you select. This is not the case with the psychoanalytical or humanist readings of the tale, which depend on

These items having a certain intrinsic significance, to understand which we have to resort to our knowledge of the world outside the text.⁴

Eagleton also says that ‘the structure of relation between the units is preserved.’ He also gives the example of a poem. Poem is the system of general laws which works together to generate meaning. Hence, he criticize the study of structuralist by saying that poem is not a system of general law while it is the poet’s feeling towards something.

                    Now I want to move to post-structuralism. As Eagleton insists that the study in post structuralism is the revisit to the study in structuralism. Jacques Derrida says that the study in post structuralism is the study of relation. He comes with the notion of center and play. The merit of post structuralism study is that it shows that the language is a system in which the relation between signified and signifier is arbitrary.

                      

WORK CITED

1.      K. Nayar, Pramod. “Contemporary Literary Theory and Cultural Theory”. Pearson 2017 print.

2.      Klages, Mary. “Literary Theory: A Guide For The Perplexed”. Bloomsbury 2015 print.

3.      Tyson, Lois. “Critical Theory today: A user friendly guide”. Routledge 2006 soft copy.

4.      Eagleton, Terry. “Literary Theory An Introduction”. Wiley 2015 print