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In praise of a structuralist pedagogy.

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Abstract

This article seeks to provide a basis for the renewal of the teaching of structuralist methods within the study of literature. Some of the reasons for the abandoning of such methods are brought forth, and it is concluded that despite those concerns structuralism still deserves a place in curriculum. A proposal is given for what an introductory structuralist curriculum could look like featuring the work of Jonathan Culler, Terence Hawkes and Roland Barthes.

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In the new forward to the 2001 reprinting of his book The Pursuit of Signs, Jonathan Culler actively reflects on the changes that have taken place in the study of literary interpretation since the publishing of the book's first edition twenty years earlier. He notes that:

In the 1960s and 1970s French structuralism had energized the study of literature as a cultural practice and mode of signification and representation, stressing its self-reflexivity, granting a pivotal role to avant-garde literature. If the meaning of avant-garde literature lies in its challenge to our habitual ways of making sense (identifying narrative sequences, recognizable characters, and so on) then the project of interpreting these challenging works requires one to make explicit the conventions and the interpretive procedures on which literary intelligibility generally relies. Thus, it is precisely the works that brazenly flout codes and conventions that direct us to the importance of understanding those conventions. [1]

Culler then goes on to contrast these projects of days gone by with the state of literary study at present:

Today ... Interpretation still reigns, but these days it is more likely to be symptomatic interpretation, which takes the work of art as the symptom of a condition or reality thought to lie outside it. Students learn to interpret literary works for what they show us about the condition of women, for instance, or about the dialectic of subversion and containment in which works of art participate. Interpretation is still the primary task, but the goal may be to identify what the work represses or illuminates by concealing, for example, how does this work portray society or what does it reveal about social attitudes to the experience of the characters in question. [2]...

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