Formalism, Structuralism and Deconstruction

1. Formalism, Structuralism and Deconstruction Three essential methods

2. Major Branches of Critical Theory

3. Pants on the ground, pants on the ground…. • What socio cultural niches do these two fashion choices represent? • how do these choices define themselves in opposition to societal norms? What are the societal norms in terms of jeans? • A formalist/new critic would write about tight or baggy jeans, exploring the symbolic meanings, ambiguity, paradox, etc. • A structuralist would write about tight and baggy jeans, focusing on how the two ideas define each other via a system of binary opposition. He might then write about the larger systems of which these pants are just a part (fashion, music, race, socio-economic class). • A deconstructionist would start off focusing on the binary and then expose that it’s a false dichotomy shifting his interest to the full range of possible jean tightnesses and the people who wear them, possibly even why they wear them and when they wear them.

4. New Criticism The text, the whole text, and nothing but the text

5. New Criticism • Replaced biographical/historical criticism that dominated the 19th century • No more combing the authors letters and diaries trying to find authorial intent • Authorial intent is unknowable! • The Intentional Fallacy – it’s fallacious (false) to think that you can know what the author intended • The author doesn’t even know what they intended • They could be influenced by their unconscious minds • Focus on “the text itself” • Symbolism + Ambiguity + Irony + Patterns + Paradox + Tension = Organic Unity (the sign of quality literature) • Peaked in the 1930’s and 40’s

6. The New Critic Asks… • What single interpretation of the text best establishes its organic unity? In other words, how do the text’s formal elements, and the multiple meanings those elements produce, all work together to support the theme, or overall meaning, of the work? • a great work will have a theme of universal human significance • When we cover post-colonialism, this idea of “universal human significance” will be brought into question • Historically, “universal human significance” usually means “appeals to western white males” • If the text is too long to account for all of its formal elements, apply this question to some aspect or aspects of its form, such as imagery, point of view, setting, or the like…

7. Structuralism The science of signs

9. Structuralism • It’s a methodology • you are engaged in structuralist activity if you examine the physical structures of all the buildings built in urban America in 1850 to discover the underlying principles that govern their composition, for example, principles of mechanical construction or of artistic form. • You are also engaged in structuralist activity if you examine the structure of a single building to discover how its composition demonstrates the underlying principles of a given structural system.

10. System and Instance, Langue and Parol • In the first example of structuralist activity, you’re generating a structural system of classification • In the second, you’re demonstrating that an individual item belongs to a particular structural class. • Structuralism is about using instances to define the systems of which they are a part or about exploring instances through the systems that define them • Genre might be the easiest way to understand structuralism as it applies to literature • How is meaning in Shaun of the Dead or Hotfuzz derived from the genre’s to which they belong?

11. In terms of literary study, the same model of structuralist activity holds true. • You are notengaged in structuralist activity if you describe the “structure” (order of events, sentence composition) of a short story to interpret what the work means or evaluate whether or not it’s good • you are engaged in structuralist activity if you examine the structure of a large number of short stories to discover the underlying principles that govern their composition, for example, principles of narrative progression (the order in which plot events occur) or of characterization (the functions each character performs in relation to the narrative as a whole). You are also engaged • If all noir stories share general patterns of diction, this is of structuralist interest • in structuralist activity you describe the structure of a single literary work to discover how its composition demonstrates the underlying principles of a given structural system (of all the works like it).

12. Generally, structuralists are not interested in • individual buildings • individual literary works • individual phenomena of any kind • They are interested only in what those individual items can tell us about the structures that underlie and organize all items of that kind. • Structuralism sees itself as a human science whose effort is to understand, in a systematic way, the fundamental structures that underlie all human experience and, therefore, all human behavior and production. • Structuralism isn’t a field of study. • It’s a method of systematizing human experience that is used in many different fields of study: for example, linguistics, anthropology, sociology, psychology, and literary studies.

13. For structuralists, the world as we know it consists of two fundamental domains • Visible • Invisible • The visible world consists of what might be called surface phenomena: all the countless objects, activities, and behaviors we observe, participate in, and interact with every day. • The invisible world consists of the (language based) structures that underlie and organize all of these phenomena so that we can make sense of them. • For example • The English language consists of over a million words, each of which can be pronounced in any number of different ways by different speakers, resulting in millions of different utterances of individual words. • How is it possible that native speakers of English master enough of this overwhelming collection of linguistic items to communicate effectively with one another at a rather advanced level of sophistication and at a rather early age?

14. The answer is fairly simple: • Even though there are millions of individual linguistic surface phenomena (individual words and all the different ways people pronounce them) there is a relatively simple structure underlying all these words • It is that structure we master. • The structure of English vocabulary consists of approximately thirty-one phonemes (fundamental units of sound recognized as meaningful by native speakers of a language) and the rules of their combination. • Most of us are not aware of these phonemes and could not describe the rules of their combination (it’s not just the alphabet) • our ability to use English vocabulary demonstrates that we have unconsciously internalized these structures. • our ability to construct simple sentences depends on our internalization of the grammatical structure subject-verb-object. • Without a structural system to govern communication, we would have no language at all. • Structuralists are about uncovering the structures that underlie all human endeavor

15. without the structuring principles that allow us to organize and understand the natural world, the data provided by our five senses would be overwhelming and meaningless. • Structuring principles allow us to differentiate • vegetables (they grow in soil; they reproduce; they’re edible) • stones (they don’t grow; they don’t reproduce; they’re not edible) • Structuring principles also allow us to differentiate among groups within a given domain • plant life with medicinal properties • plant life with harmful properties • plant life with neutral properties

16. Where do these structures come from? • Structuralists believe they are generated by the human mind, which is thought of as a structuring mechanism. • This is an important and radical idea because it means that the order we see in the world is the order we impose on it. • Our understanding of the world does not result from our perception of structures that exist in the world. The structures we think we perceive in the world are products of human consciousness • Structuralism sees itself as a science of humankind, for its efforts to discover the structures that underlie the world’s surface phenomena • whether we place those phenomena, for example, in the domain of mathematics, biology, linguistics, religion, psychology, or literature imply an effort to discover something about the innate structures of human consciousness.

17. Key StructuralistVocab • Differance (say it like you’re French)simply means that our ability to identify an entity (such as an object, a concept, or a sound) is based on the difference we perceive between it and all other entities. • binary oppositions: two ideas, directly opposed, each of which we understand by means of its opposition to the other. • we understand up as the opposite of down, female as the opposite of male, good as the opposite of evil, black as the opposite of white, and so on. • a linguistic signconsisting, like the two sides of a coin, of two inseparable parts: signifier + signified. • A signifieris a “sound-image” (a mental imprint of a linguistic sound); • the signifiedis the concept to which the signifier refers. • Thus, a word is not merely a sound-image (signifier), nor is it merely a concept (signified). A sound-image becomes a word only when it is linked with a concept. • the relationship between signifier and signified is arbitrary

18. Sign, Signifier, Signified

19. there is no necessary connection between a given sound-image and the concept to which it refers. • There is no reason why the concept of a tree should be represented by the sound-image “tree” instead of by the sound-image “arbre” • the concept of a book is just as well represented by the sound-image “livre” as the sound-image “book.” • The relationship between signifier and signified is merely a matter of social convention: it’s whatever the community using it says it is. • The idea that signifiers, or linguistic sound-images, do not refer to things in the world but to concepts in our mind is crucial for structuralism. • We don’t discover the world; we “create” it according to structures formed by the human mind. • language is the most fundamental of these structures, and the one through which our beliefs are passed on from one generation to the next • through language that we learn to conceive and perceive the world the way we do.

21. But Mr. Hayworth! a rooster says Cockadoodledo! Surely in this case signifier=signified! • In French it goes: cocorico • In Dutch it's: kukeleku • In German it's: kikeriki

23. Learning a new language carries with it the potential to learn to see the world in new ways. • If native speakers of English learn to speak an Eskimo language, they may learn to see snow quite differently, • there are many different words for what English calls snow, depending on the size and texture of the flake, the density of the snowfall, the angle at which it falls, the direction from which the storm originates, and so on.

24. Eskimo Snow Lexemes • Snow particles • Snowflake - qanuk • Frost -kaneq • Fine snow/rain particles -kanevvluk • Drifting particles - natquik • Clinging particles – nevluk • Fallen snow • Fallen snow on the ground - aniu • Soft, deep fallen snow on the ground – muruaneq • Crust on fallen snow – qetrar • Fresh fallen snow on the ground – nutaryuk • Fallen snow floating on water – qanisqineq • Snow formations • Snow bank – qengaruk • Snow block – utvak • snow (formation) about to collapse – navcite • Meterological events • Blizzard – pirtuk • Severe blizzard - cellallir

25. If native speakers of English learn to speak Spanish, they may learn a new way to view the idea of human existence • Spanish has two different verbs for the English verb to be: ser and estar. • Ser means “to be” in the sense of what one permanently considers oneself. One uses ser to say “I am a human being,” “I am a woman,” “I am Mexican,” and the like. • One uses estarto make statements about one’s changeable state of being, such as “I am at the supermarket” or “I am a cab driver.” And one uses neither ser nor estarto say “I am hungry” or “I am sleepy,” • In Spanish these are not considered states of being. In Spanish one has hunger or sleepiness—tengohambreor tengosueño—but these are not states of being. • When speaking a particular language, our attention is drawn to particular aspects of our experience, or more precisely, particular experiences are generated by that language. • In other words, our language mediates our experience of our world and ourselves: it determines what we see when we look around us and when we look at ourselves.

26. structuralism does not attempt to interpret what individual texts mean or even whether or not a given text is good literature. • Issues of interpretation and literary quality are in the domain of surface phenomena, the domain of parole. • Structuralism seeks instead the langueof literary texts, the structure that allows texts to make meaning, often referred to as a grammar or even poeticsbecause it governs the rules by which fundamental literary elements are identified (for example, the hero, the damsel in distress, and the villain) and combined (for example, the hero tries to save the damsel in distress from the villain).

29. Structuralism and I Love Lucy • I Love Lucy has it’s own langue that has helped to shape the langue of sitcoms in general • Suppose a long-lost episode of I Love Lucy was discovered, we start to watch it, full of suspense… • At the 13 minute mark, Lucy gets lost! • What happens next?

30. Each episode stages a problem before the midpoint commercial and resolves that problem before the episode ends. • We know the formula so well we hardly have to think about it, but thinking about it helps us to know it better • Now let’s try something different… • We hit the 13 minute mark, Lucy dies!

32. Since we have an adept competence as readers of sitcoms, we know that Lucy can’t die. • It’s not in the form, it’s not part of the langue, it’s not part of the poetics of classical form sitcoms. • If she did die, of course, it’d turn out that she wasn’t really dead, she was only playing, some other character had made a terrible mistake… but would the poetics, the conventions of the form, even allow that? • At the end of the episode, nothing can be any different than at the start of the episode • Take three, we hit the thirteen minute mark, Lucy discovers she’s pregnant, and then—Lucy has an abortion! • What, why not?

33. It’s TV in the Eisenhower Administration • Even though women had abortions in the fifties, not TV characters, and certainly not national idols, not Lucy. • No problem can arise that can’t be solved and fully resolved by the end of the hour. • There are unspoken rules or codes of social decorum and censorship • If we were to list those rules, we’d learn a great deal about sitcoms, their evolution, and the cultures that they express and repress

34. Later sitcoms defined themselves by including what the earlier, classic sitcoms excluded • All in the Family (1971-1979) • Roseanne (1988-1997) • Seinfeld (1989-1998) • Family Guy (1999- ) • The Office (2005- ) • After all in the family, things that were unimaginable in I Love Lucy –many of the same crises of social, political, and cultural strife that fill the daily news- shape the routine plots while still harkening back to the form they inherited. • The dialogue between earlier and later sitcoms is intertextuality, which simply means understanding one text by comparing it to another.

35. With Peter Pan • Of what systems is Peter Pan an instance of? • How does it help to define that system? • How is it defined by it? • What systems of binaries are at play within the novel?

36. Deconstruction Meaning is slippery

37. In Review, Structuralism • All meaning is imposed upon reality by the human mind through language. It is impossible to know reality but through language. • While this is a huge idea, structuralists themselves did very little with it. The full potential of this approach was most effectively realized by various poststructuralist movements such as deconstruction • Structuralism is a method not a field of study, most famously it has been applied to literature, anthropology, and linguistics • Structuralists seek to define systems by their instances and instances by the systems of which they are apart

39. Deconstruction • Initiated by Jaques Derrida in 1967 • Deconstruction, in and of itself, is almost dead. But it’s at the heart of everything that’s followed it. • Deconstruction relies on disunity and decentering • In their definition of a system, structuralists are finding a center and seeing how it organizes everything around it into a secure, stable, unified order. • Deconstructionists do not believe in perfect systems or single explanations. • To a deconstructionist, everything is multiple, unstable, and without unity.

40. deconstruction has a good deal to offer us: • it can improve our ability to think critically and to see more readily the ways in which our experience is determined by ideologies of which we are unaware • they are “built into” our language. • Not just binaries, but hierarchical binaries • useful tool for Marxism, feminism, and other theories that attempt to make us aware of the oppressive role ideology can play in our lives. • What binaries are at the heart of Marxism? Feminism? GLBT Theory? Queer Theory? Post-Colonialism? Race? • In order to understand how deconstruction reveals the hidden work of ideology in our daily experience of ourselves and our world, we must first understand deconstruction’s view of language because. • according to Derrida, language is not the reliable tool of communication we believe it to be • It is rather a fluid, ambiguous domain in which ideologies program us without our being aware of them.

41. Language is Fluid

42. President Bush says the Marines do not have to go to Iran (implying that he’s lying). • President Bush says the Marines do not have to go to Iran (implying that he’s correcting a false rumor). • President Bush says the Marines do not have to go to Iran (implying that some other group has to go). • President Bush says the Marines do not have to go to Iran (implying that another important person had said that the marines have to go to Iran). • President Bush says the Marines do not have to go to Iran (implying that they can go if they want to). • President Bush says the Marines do not have to go to Iran (implying that they have to go somewhere else).

43. To explore the specific ways in which our language determines our experience, Derrida borrowed and transformed structuralism’s idea that we tend to conceptualize our experience in terms of binary oppositions. • For example, according to structuralism, we understand the word good by contrasting it with the word evil. Reason as the opposite of emotion, masculine as the opposite of feminine, civilized as the opposite of primitive, straight is the opposite of gay, and so on. • Derrida noted that these binary oppositions are also little hierarchies. • One term in the pair is always privileged, or considered superior to the other. (In the binary oppositions listed above, the first term in each pair is, in Western culture, the privileged term.) • By finding the binary oppositions at work in a cultural production (such as a novel, a film, a conversation, a classroom, or a courtroom trial), and by identifying which member of the opposition is privileged, one can discover something about the ideology promoted by that production.

44. How to Write a Deconstructionist Paper • Deconstructionist interpretation tends to follow what we call a double reading. • In the first stage, the critic identifies a confidently singular interpretation of a text, either based on the structuralist or “new” critics model. • Then, in the second stage, the critic finds things that undermine the first reading, things that “break down the binary” or “explode the binary” or a moment of undecidability which you may pretentiously call aporia

46. Old Approaches • The New Critics might • seek out how each word is a symbol • Find a paradoxical, ambiguous tension between the abstractness of the first line and the concreteness of the second • resolve that conflict into a balance that provides organic unity to the poem • A Structuralist could • pursue a similar reading, finding a binary opposition between the opening abstraction and the concreteness that it gives way to • the first line acting as a signifier to the second lines signified • Define the poem as an instance in the genre of modernist poetry and relay what meaning being a part of that system holds for the poem

47. Deconstructing “In a Station of the Metro” (1913) • The deconstructionist • Begins with the old readings and sets up a double reading • If the first lines abstractness can act as a signifier to the concreteness of the second line’s signified, then the second line might as well be signifier to the first lines signified • What makes one line more concrete than the other? • Definitive Articles and Demonstrative Pronouns • Specific ghostliness? Specific but undescribed faces in a specific but undescribed crowd? • The title works as a line unto itself, interrupting the potential binary between the other two lines • In the early 20th century, perhaps the metro was abstractly a signifier of modernity at large and especially of mechanized modernity and an urban future, a future both suggested and undermined by the petals in the second line • The petals can suggest nature, antithesis to the modernity of the metro

48. Implicit vs. Explicit Ideologies • TEWWG

49. In Review, Deconstructionists… • Read the text against itself, so as to expose where meanings are expressed which might be contrary to the surface meaning • Implicit vs. Explicit ideologies • What is TEWWG really saying about a woman’s voice and identity? • What is Peter Pan really saying about the value of women? • Fixate upon surface features of words to expose the fluidity of meaning in a given text, destabilizing relationship between signifier and signified • Bush and Time Flies examples • They seek to show that a text is categorized by disunity rather than unity • Concentrate on a single passage and analyze it so intensively that it becomes impossible to maintain a single reading • Pounds’ In a Station at the Metro • They look for shifts or breaks of various kinds in a text and see these as evidence of what is repressed or glossed over in silence by a text, calling these discontinuities fault-lines. • Undermine binaries