structuralism

structuralism theory that uses culturally interconnected signs to reconstruct systems of relationships rather than studying isolated, material things in themselves. This method found wide use from the early 20th cent. in a variety of fields, especially linguistics , particularly as formulated by Ferdinand de Saussure and Roman Jakobson . Anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss used structuralism to study the kinship systems of different societies. No single element in such a system has meaning except as an integral part of a set of structural connections. These interconnections are said to be binary in nature and are viewed as the permanent, organizational categories of experience. Structuralism has been influential in literary criticism and history, as with the work of Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault . In France after 1968 this search for the deep structure of the mind was criticized by such "poststructuralists" as Jacques Derrida , who abandoned the goal of reconstructing reality scientifically in favor of "deconstructing" the illusions of metaphysics (see semiotics ).

Bibliography: See J. Culler, Structuralist Poetics (1976); J. Sturrock, ed., Structuralism and Since: From Lévi-Strauss to Derrida (1979).

structuralism One facet of a larger movement in modern literary criticism, associated particularly with Claude Lévi-Strauss, a philosophical anthropologist, and now applied to biblical studies. It suggests that critical attention be focused less on evidence about authors or editors of the text but more on the text as it stands, and what it conveys to the readers. For texts have only a relational, not an essential, meaning. Every word fits into a complex pattern of binary oppositions, and it is this structure which gives it meaning. Structuralism is indifferent to historical investigation but, assuming the integrity of the text, analyses the structure of the human mind and group which have produced it. For basic human patterns form themselves into structures and are expressed in texts. A biblical text is therefore to be read and grasped as a whole and is more than a compilation of parts or sources. By it the basic convictions and conditions of the author are transmitted to the reader.

Critics of the movement argue that some knowledge of the authors of the biblical books is always helpful; and because most of the books are composite, a knowledge of the history of their composition remains indispensable.