536
LEO BERSANI
tion of the subject written for the
Que sais-je?
collection, and recently
published in the United States as
Structuralism.
For some brilliant
essays on structuralist methodology, there is of course Levi-Strauss's
Structural Anthropology.
As far as collections go, I recommend the
Yale French Studies
issue on structuralism, as well as a volume en–
titled
The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man
/
The
!
Structuralist Contro versy,
in which you will find several of the papers
read at an international symposium on this topic held at Johns Hop–
kins in 1966.
My purpose here is quite specific: I hope to elucidate some of
the fundamental premises and methods of structuralism in the course ,
of a discussion of several structuralist enterprises which have liter–
ature - or the "literary function" - as their object. In their dis–
cussions of literature, the structuralists have studied individual works;
they have proposed typologies of literary discourse; and they have
offered models for a new type of critical discourse. What have the
results been like?
The structuralist approach - not only to literature, but also to
primitive myths, to mass media, to the world of fashion - is easily
recognizable by the highly technical instruments of analysis it borrows
from linguistics. The use of linguistic terminology in structuralist writ–
ing does not mean a narrowing of interest to the "merely" linguistic
aspects of a literary work. There has been some disagreement within
the structuralist community about the place of verbal language in a
more general semiological system, in a discipline that is concerned
with
all
kinds of social signs. Nonetheless, most contemporary Eu–
ropean structuralists seem to agree with the French linguist Emile
Benveniste, who contends that " . .. the configuration of language
determines all semiotic systems." They would also argue that, while
there is obviously enormous variety from one language to another, the
fundamental structures of language are universal. Literature is a cer–
tain kind of particularization of language; its structures can be under–
stood only in reference to the structures of language itself.
If
language
is
the trunk of the semiological tree, systematic linguistic analysis is
necessary to reveal the foundation on which all human messages are
constructed. And a description of the entire tree (which is the ulti–
mate structuralist ambition) would be a diagram of the total capacity
of the human brain for communication.
The appeal to linguistics in literary structuralism makes for
