The Routledge Dictionary of Literary Terms

226 Structuralism
three most important, paradigmatic,
models of analysis.
First, is the theory of literature and the
attempt to formulate general rules to
distinguish literary from non-literary
discourse: see POETICS. ‘Poetics’ is the
theory of ‘literariness’ rather than the
description of individual literary works.
The late Roman Jakobson was the key
figure in this ambitious enterprise:
his seminal paper ‘Linguistics and
poetics’ (1960) proposed what would in
Chomskyan terms constitute a set of ‘substantive
universals’ to characterize the
essence of literature, based on processes
of repetition, parallelism and equivalence.
Another version of poetic theory follows
the lead of Chomsky and relocates literariness:
it is said to be not an objective
property of texts but a faculty of (some)
readers who are said to possess a ‘literary
competence’ in addition to and analogous
to the universal ‘linguistic competence’
postulated by Chomsky. See J. Culler,
Structuralist Poetics (1975). Neither of
these proposals seems very plausible; for
a critique, see Fowler, ‘Linguistics and,
and versus, Poetics’, reprinted in
Literature as Social Discourse (1981).
However, if the writing of generative
rules for all and only those texts constituting
Literature seems an impossible
project, the more modest programme of
generative grammars for specific genres
has seemed a feasible enterprise, and this
has been attempted by Tzvetan Todorov in
a number of studies: see his Grammaire
du Décaméron (1969) and The Fantastic
(1973).
Second, is the analysis of verse where
the reference-text here is the analysis by
Jakobson and Lévi-Strauss of Baudelaire’s
‘Les chats’ (translated in the DeGeorge
and Lane anthologies). The analysts sift
the poem for all kinds of linguistic symmetries,
from rhyme to syntactic minutiae,
such as tense and number, and thus rework
it into an intensely patterned formal
object, static and impersonal and remote
from the communicative and interpersonal
practices which language ordinarily
serves. This analysis has been taken as an
example of the application of linguistics to
literary analysis, fabricating ‘poetic’ structures
which the reader does not perceive:
see M. Riffaterre, ‘Describing poetic
structures’ (1966), reprinted in Ehrmann;
Fowier, ‘Language and the reader’ in Style
and Structure in Literature (1975).
Aspects of Jakobson’s theory provided
illumination in verse analysis, as
Riffaterre’s own later work demonstrates:
see his Semiotics of Poetry (1978).
Third, has been the more successful
analysis of narrative structure. The
inspiration came from Vladimir Propp’s
Morphology of the Folk-Tale (1928),
which appeared in French translation in
1957 and in English in 1958. Propp noted
that, though the individual characters in
Russian tales were very diverse, their
functions (villain, helper, etc.) could be
described in a limited number of terms
(he suggested thirty-one, falling into
seven superordinate categories). By reference
to these elements, the narrative
ordering of any tale could be analysed as
a sequence of ‘functions of the dramatis
personae’ and associated actions. This is
in fact a generative grammar of narrative:
a finite system (paradigm) of abstract
units generates an infinite set of narrative
sequences (syntagms). The linguistic
analogy was seized on by Lévi-Strauss
and made explicit by A. J. Greimas
(Sémantique Structurale, 1966), who
provided a sophisticated reinterpretation
of Propp’s analysis in semantic terms. It
became a standard assumption in narratology
that the structure of a story was
homologous with the structure of a
sentence; this assumption allowed the