Assignment Paper no 7: Literary Theory and Criticism; 20th Century, Western Theories and Indian Poetics

     

Paper-07

Name: Ramiz M. Solanki

M. A. Sem:- 2

Roll No. 27

Batch: 2017-19

Enrolment No.2069108420180051

Paper No. 7 (Literary Criticism)

Assignment Topic: Structuralism

Email Id: ramiz.solanki39@gmail.com

Submitted to: Department of English MKBU.

  What is Structuralism.

                                   The term ‘Structuralism’ itself says that it is somehow related to the     structure. It is the study of a structure of any kind like literature and the movies.

(1)    a method of interpretation and analysis of aspects of human cognition, behaviour, culture, and experience, which focuses on relationships of contrast between elements in a conceptual system.

(2)  Structuralism is a method of interpreting and analyzing such things as language, literature, and society, which focuses on contrasting ideas or elements of structure and attempts to show how they relate to the whole structure.

Structuralism according to Gerard Genette.

Structuralism as a method is peculiarly imitable to literary criticism which is a discourse upon a discourse.

                           Gerard Genette writes at the outset in his essay ‘Structuralism and Literary Criticism’that methods developed for the study of one discipline could be satisfactorily applied to the study of other discipline as well. This is what he calls “intellectual bricolage[i]’, borrowing a term from Claude Levi-Strauss. This is precisely so, so far as structuralism is concerned. Structuralism is the name given to Saussure’s approach to language as a system of relationship. But it is applied also to the study of philosophy, literature and other sciences of humanity.

                           Literary criticism in that it is meta-linguistic in character and comes into being / existence as metaliterature. In his words: “it can therefore be metaliterature, that is to say, ‘a literature of which literature is the imposed object’.”That is, it is literature written to explain literature and language used in it to explain the role of language in literature.

                 In nutshell, we can say that  the essence of Structuralism is the belief that ‘things cannot be understood in isolation, they have to be seen in the context of larger structures they are part of’. In this context it is interesting to know that Gerard Genette proposed the term ‘transtextuality’ as a more inclusive term, along with paratextuality, hypertextuality, architextuality, metatextuality, etc.

Focus of Structuralism and the prime job of Structuralist.

                                      Since, larger structures are formed by our way of perceiving the world, in structuralist criticism, consequently, there is a constant movement away from the interpretation of the individual literary work towards understanding the larger structures which contain them. For example, a structuralist analysis of Browning’s poem “My Last Dutchess” necessitates more focus on the relevant genre – the dramatic monologue, and the concept of courtly love, Aristocracy in Renaissance Italy, etc., rather than on the close reading of the formal elements of the text.

Structuralists firmly believe that all human activity is constructed, not natural or “essential.” Hence, they focus their attention on systems/codes that give meaning to any human activity. Language is one such code. By doing so, structuralists embark on the massive project of giving literary criticism the rigour of a science of language. Its historical origins are in Russian Formalist criticism and the Linguistics of Saussure.

(1)  The Objective of ‘Poetics’ is not the Text but the Architext

The single objective that guided Gerard Genette in his quest was the study of poetics. Poetics may be defined as the study of shared or shareable properties of literary works, in contrast to the study of individual works. Hence, Gérard Genette asserts that the object of poetics is not the text, but the architext - the transcendent categories (literary genres, modes of enunciation, and types of discourse, among others) to which each individual text belongs, and thus seeking to link these categories in a system embracing the entire field of literature.

Structuralist criticism aims at forming a poetics or the science of literature from a study of literary works.

(2)  Literary Criticism as Intellectual Bricolage: Literary Critic as Bricoleur

Gerard Genette writes at the outset in his essay ‘Structuralism and Literary Criticism’ that methods developed for the study of one discipline could be satisfactorily applied to the study of other discipline as well. This is what he calls “intellectual bricolage’, borrowing a term from Claude Levi-Strauss. This is precisely so, so far as structuralism is concerned.

(3)  Distinction between the Critic and the Artist

Genette first introduces the good structuralist conception of the bricoleur as opposed to the engineer; it will turn out that a critic is a bricoleur, working with what is at hand. Genette turns the artist into the engineer. Genette then makes the point that as literary criticism uses language to speak of language use, it is in fact a metaliterature, a literature on a literature. The distinction between the critic and the writer lies not only in the secondary and limited character of the critical material (literature) as opposed to the unlimited and primary character of the poetic or fictional material (the universe).

(4)  The Critic as a Structuralist

The writer works by means of concepts and the critic by means of signs. the dual function of the critic’s work, which is to produce meaning with the work of others, but also to produce his own work out of this meaning. If such a thing as ‘critical poetry’ exists, therefore, it is in the sense in which Lévi-Strauss speaks of a ‘poetry of bricolage’: just as the bricoleur ‘speaks through things,’ the critic speaks-in the full sense, that is to say, speaks up-through books, and we will paraphrase Lévi-Strauss once more by saying that ‘without ever completing his project he always puts something of himself into it.’ 

In this sense, therefore, one can regard literary criticism as a ‘structuralist activity’

The critic reads Literature as Signs and hence as Cultural Production

 The critic is secondary to the writer, a bricoleur to the writer’s engineer, but in a position therefore to be primary in the analysis of culture. The critic treats as signs what the writer is creating as concept: the attitude, the disposition is different. The critic in reading literature as signs is reading it as a cultural production, constructed according to various preconceptions, routines, traditions and so forth of that culture. The critic does not ignore the meaning, but treats it as mediated by signs, as there is no attachment to anything beyond the sign.

(5)  Rediscovering the Message in the Code  

Structuralist method as such is constituted at the very moment when one rediscovers the message in the code, uncovered by an analysis of the immanent structures and not imposed from the outside by ideological prejudices, whereas Poststructuralists will deny that anything can be innocent of ideology.

(6)  Structuralism Is About Meaning, Not Just About Form

Genette tries to emphasise the fact that structuralism is not just about form alone, but also about meaning, since linguistics is about meaning. It is a study of the cultural construction of meaning according to the relations of signs that constitute the meaning-system of the culture. Finally in this section, Genette looks forward to structural analysis at the more macro level of the text, of the analysis of narratives.

(7)  Language Acquisition for a Child and Literature Acquisition for a Man

We know that the acquisition of language by a child proceeds not by a simple extension of vocabulary, but by a series of internal segmentations that the child makes for itself. At each stage, the few words at its disposal are for the child the whole of language and it uses them to designate everything, with increasing precision. Similarly, for a man who has read only one book, this book is for him the whole of ‘literature,’ in the primary sense of the term; when he has read two, these two books will share his entire literary field, with no gap between them, and so on.

The Literature of mankind as a whole can be regarded as constituted by a similar process – literary ‘production’ being parole, and the ‘consumption’ of this literature by society as a langue.

The nineteenth century, forgot to take into account this totality – this coherence of the whole, but rather concentrated on the individual history of works and of their authors.

As literature is a system, no individual work of literature is an autonomous whole; similarly, literature itself is not autonomous but is part of the larger structures of signification of the culture.

Gerard Genette’s Structural Narattology.

The most important of the structural narratologists, Gerard Genette, has argued for the autonomous nature of the literary text. Genette’s work has been of particular use to literary critics for his  attempts to develop models of reading texts in a rigorously analytical manner. The analysis of narrative has been Genette’s abiding concern, as his voluminous work on the subject adequately demonstrates. Here  we shall look at the more important notions of the narrative suggested by Genette.

Genette, for instance, argues that the narrative voice has many levels. The voice is constituted by the following elements:

(1) Narrative Instance: This refers to the actual moment and context of the narration, the “temporal setting” of the enunciation of the narration. This context of the narrative moment is crucial to understand the meaning of that utterance.

(2) Narrative Time: This is the time indicated by the tense (of the verb) in the narrative. The narrative instance also indicates the time of narration with respect to the events narrated. For example, the narrative may be about a future event, where the narrative time is prophetic. Or, in certain novels the time of the event is the time of the narrative itself, where the event is narrated as it happens. In third person narratives there is no such time of narration, because the events are recounted from a perspective outside the narrative itself. Thus narrative time refers to the time of the narrative.

(3) Narrative Levels: This refers to the relation of the acts narrated to the act of narration itself. For example, is the narrative a story within a story?, for instance. The narrator may tell us about the events which lead to his narrating to us the story of a character: “Dear reader, when I was in Paris I met this young man . . . we became friends . . . and then he suffered a terrible tragedy . . . It happened this way….” Here the early remarks are a prelude to the narrative of the events that befell the narrator and his friend, which are to be narrated soon, as the final ellipsis indicates.

Genette discerns four important levels of narrative. They are:

(1) Order: The sequence of events in relation to the order of narration. An event may have taken place before the actual narration (analepsis, or flashback); it may not yet have taken place, and is merely anticipated/indicated/predicted by the narrative (prolepsis); discordance between “story” narrated and “plot” (actual order of events as they occurred and not the order in which they are narrated: anachrony); or there may be a movement between one narrative level and another (metalepsis).

(2) Duration: The rhythm at which the events take place (does the narrative expand episodes, summarise them?). There are four speeds of narration:

(a) ellipsis: infinitely rapid,
(b) summary: relatively rapid,
(c) scene: relatively slow,
(d) descriptive: no progress in the story.

(3) Frequency: The extent of repetition in a narrative (how many times has an event happened in the story?).

(4) Mood: This is distinguished by Genette into two further categories:
(a) distance, or the relationship of the narration to what it narrates. This distance may be diegetic, or a plain recounting of the story (the presentational level which is immediate as language or gesture), or mimetic, or representing the story (or character, situation, event);
(b) perspective or what is commonly called “point of view” or focus. Focus determines the extent to which the narrator allows us to penetrate into the character or the event. Narrative focus alternates and shifts throughout the narrative and may be of two kinds (1)paralipse: where the narrator with-holds information from the reader which the reader ought to receive according to the prevailing focus; (2) paralepse: where the narrator presents information to the reader which the reader according to the prevailing focus ought not to receive.

(5)Genette favours “focalisation” over the traditional “point of view.” Focalisation while not completely free of the visual connotation, is broadened here to include: cognitive,emotive, and ideological orientations of the narrator. Types of focalisation may be based on TWO criteria: (a) position of narrator relative to the story, (b) degree of persistence. Focalisation also includes TWO aspects- the subject or focaliser (one whose perception orients the presentation and the object or the focalised (what the focaliser perceives/presents for the reader). Focalisation based on the position of the focaliser is of two types:
(1) external: with its vehicle the “narrator-focaliser.” This is both panchronic and panoramic (across time and space)
(ii) internal: with its vehicle the “character-focaliser.” This is naturally more restricted because a character’s range of vision is always circumscribed by her/his location vis-a-vis places, people and events.

Vocalisation whether external or internal can be within- presenting the thoughts and emotions of the character, or without-presenting mil\ the outward manifestation of the object. Frequently, novels have both modes of localisation (it must be admitted that the “within/without” distinction in Genette is quite blurred in practice). There may also be “retrospective focalisation” where the character focalises her/his past.

(6) Every narrative, for Genette, has the following elements: the story, which is the actual order of events in the text, narrative discourse and the narration (which is the telling of the story). The statements made constitute narrative discourse. The narration is the act of making the statements. Narrative discourse is thus imbedded in the narration of the story, but is not identical to either of them. This element of narrative discourse is Genette’s work in his later books.

(7) A narrator may be of any type: homodiegetic, heterodiegetic, intradiegetic, extradiegetic, autodiegetic. The extradiegetic narrator is “above” the story. The heterodiegetic narrator is one who does not participate in the story. When characters become narrators they are intradiegetic. If such an intradiegetic narrator is also one of the characters in the story narrated by him or her (i.e. when the narrator tells her/his story to someone else in the context of the novel (e.g.: Charles told Sam: “let me tell you – what happened when I went to Delhi to meet my friends at the university…” what follows is Charles’ role as an intradiegetic narrator of his own story to Sam, all within the context of a novel that you as a reader are reading) then s/he becomes a homodiegetic intradiegetic narrator. When a character narrates her/his own tale(e.g., in an autobiography) they may be described as autodiegetic narrators.

(8) Genette also develops a whole typology of intertextuality (the notion that a text refers to, echoes, is influenced by a range of texts, thus making each text a site of numerous convergent texts) in his later work, especially in his seminal Palimpsests and Paratexts. “Transtextuality” is textual transcendence and cuts across genres. Hypertexts are late texts that follow (directly referring or writing back to an earlier text, such as Coetzee’s Foe that refers back to Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. This early text is a hypotext.Paratextuality refers to the relations between the body of text with its titles, epigraphs, illustrations, notes, and first drafts. Architextuality refers to the genre demarcations. Metatextuality refers to the relationship between a commentary and its object.

Conclusion.

To Genette, when literature is taken as a whole, it would be easy to add to it, everything that is not literature also, for example, the relation between literature and social life as a whole. Hence literariness is also a function of non-literariness, and hence no stable definition can be given of the term ‘literariness’. Everyone knows that the birth of the cinema altered the status of literature, by depriving it of some of its functions, but also by giving literature some of its means. Similarly, the meaning of an individual work is ultimately and inevitably only the meaning within a larger frame of cultural meanings, and these meanings change in relation to one another across time and cultures. A structural analysis of the construction of cultural meaning can thence replace the meaning of the individual instance, the particular work, while the meaning of the individual work is illumined and rendered more fully significant by being read in the context of its full systemic, cultural meaning.

If literature has to survive the development of other media of communication, literature should stop approaching it as being ‘self-evident’, ‘autonomous’, ‘self-contained,’ and ‘self-dependent’, but rather reach across frontiers, and access the non-literary into the literary, wherein lies the success of the Structuralist Approach to Literary criticism.

Work cited.

https://literariness.org/2016/12/03/gerard-genette-and-structural-narratology/

https://rufusonline.blogspot.in/2016/10/structuralism-and-literary-criticism.html

http://dilipbarad.blogspot.in/2015/03/structuralism-and-literary-criticism.html.