Structuralism criticism

lain) and combined (for example, the hero tries to save the damsel in distress from the villain). In short, structuralism isn’t interested in what a text means, but in how a text means what it means. Thus, The Great Gatsby’s Jay Gatsby, Daisy Buchanan, and Tom Buchanan are surface phenomena that draw their meaning from the ways in which they relate to the structures underlying them: respectively, hero, damsel in distress, and villain.

As you may remember from chapter 6, reader-response critics also focus on how a text means rather than what it means. Indeed, there is some overlap between the two disciplines, for structuralists and reader-response critics would agree that there is a relationship between the underlying structure of the text and the reader’s response to it. After all, structuralism believes that the structures we perceive in literature, as in everything else, are projections of the structures of human consciousness. However, you’ll recall that the final goal of reader-response criticism is to understand the reader’s experience, which structuralists would call a surface phenomenon. In contrast, the final goal of structuralism is to understand the underlying structure of human experience, which exists at the level of langue, whether we are examining the structures of literature or speculating on the relationship between the structures of literature and the structures of human consciousness. In other words, reader-response criticism does not seek a universal science that would link innate structures of human consciousness to all human experience, behavior, and production. Structuralism seeks precisely that.

RT19943.indb 220 6/29/06 7:11:04 PMStructuralist criticism 1 Structuralist approaches to literature have tended to focus on three specific areas of literary studies: the classification of literary genres, the description of narrative operations, and the analysis of literary interpretation. For the sake of clarity, we’ll discuss these three areas separately.

The structure of literary genres Let’s begin our discussion of structuralist approaches to genre with a simplified summary of one of its most complex and sweeping examples: what Northrop Frye calls his theory of myths, which is a theory of genres that seeks the structural principles underlying the Western literary tradition.1 Mythoi (plural of mythos)is a term Frye uses to refer to the four narrative patterns that, he argues, structure myth. These mythoi, he claims, reveal the structural principles underlying literary genres: specifically, comedy, romance, tragedy, and irony/satire.

According to Frye, human beings project their narrative imaginations in two fundamental ways: in representations of an ideal world and in representations of the real world. The ideal world, which is better than the real world, is the world of innocence, plenitude, and fulfillment. Frye calls it the mythos of summer, and he associates it with the genre of romance. This is the world of adventure, of successful quests in which brave, virtuous heroes and beautiful maidens overcome villainous threats to the achievement of their goals. Examples of romance you may be familiar with include the chivalrous adventures in Sir Thomas Mal-