Structuralism and Post-Structuralism

What this lesson develops

This lesson teaches the most theoretically demanding pairing on the course: structuralism (the project, founded on Saussure's linguistics, of uncovering the systems of signs and oppositions through which texts produce meaning) and post-structuralism (the radicalisation of that project, which argues that those systems are unstable and that meaning is never finally fixed). The two approaches ask the most fundamental question criticism can ask — how does language mean at all, and can a text ever have a single, settled meaning? — and the answers reshape how you read everything else. By the end you should be able to identify the binary oppositions structuring a text, and then deconstruct them: show the text undermining the very order it appears to assert.

As a lens, this pairing serves AO5 in an unusually direct way. Barthes's "death of the author" is, in effect, a theoretical licence for the whole assessment objective: it argues that a text's meaning is produced by reading, not dictated by the author, which is exactly why "different interpretations" are legitimate rather than wrong. Post-structuralism thus underwrites the plurality AO5 rewards. But the approach earns marks only when fastened to AO2 analysis of the writer's methods and AO1 textual evidence: deconstruction that cannot point to the words on the page is not criticism but assertion. It connects readily across texts (AO4) wherever two works are organised by the same oppositions — civilisation and savagery, illusion and reality, speech and silence. The discipline this lesson insists on is that you can do structuralist and post-structuralist reading — find the binary, show its instability — without ever parading the vocabulary; the analysis matters more than the label.

Structuralism

Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913)

Saussure, a Swiss linguist, is the founding figure of structuralism. His lectures were compiled by his students and published posthumously as the Course in General Linguistics (Cours de linguistique générale, 1916). His key insight was that language is a system of signs, and that meaning is produced not by the relationship between words and things but by the relationship between signs within the system.

Key Concept	Definition	Example
The sign	A unit of meaning, consisting of a signifier (the word/sound) and a signified (the concept it refers to)	The word "tree" (signifier) refers to the concept of a tree (signified)
Arbitrary relationship	The connection between signifier and signified is arbitrary — there is no natural reason why the sound "tree" should mean what it means	Different languages use different signifiers for the same signified: "tree" (English), "arbre" (French), "Baum" (German)
Difference	Meaning is produced by difference — we understand what a word means by understanding what it does NOT mean	"Hot" means what it means because it is NOT "cold," "warm," "lukewarm," etc.
Langue and parole	Langue = the underlying system of rules; parole = individual speech acts	Grammar (langue) vs. a specific sentence (parole)

Binary Oppositions

Structuralists argued that meaning is structured through binary oppositions — pairs of opposed terms that organise our understanding:

Binary Opposition	Cultural Significance
Nature / Culture	Fundamental structuralist opposition — what is "natural" vs. what is socially constructed
Male / Female	Gender as a structuring opposition
Self / Other	Identity defined by what it excludes
Civilised / Savage	Colonial ideology structured through this opposition
Light / Dark	Moral, racial, and psychological connotations
Speech / Writing	Derrida's deconstruction begins here (see below)

Application: In Othello, the binary opposition Black/White structures the entire play. Othello's tragedy is his inability to escape the binary: he is defined as "other" by a society that structures identity through racial opposition. Iago exploits this binary relentlessly: "an old black ram / Is tupping your white ewe."

Claude Lévi-Strauss: Myth and Structure

Lévi-Strauss, a French anthropologist, applied Saussure's structural linguistics to mythology and culture. He argued that myths across different cultures share deep structures — recurring binary oppositions (raw/cooked, nature/culture, life/death) that, he proposed, reflect underlying patterns of human thought. A myth's "meaning," on this view, lies not in any single telling but in the structure of oppositions common to all its versions.

Application: The opposition between "civilisation" and "nature" in The Handmaid's Tale can be read structurally. Gilead presents itself as "civilisation" — ordered, moral, godly — in opposition to the "chaos" of the pre-Gilead world. Atwood then deconstructs the opposition: Gilead's "civilisation" is barbaric, and the "chaos" it claims to have cured was, in fact, freedom. The structure is built precisely so that it can be inverted.

How Structuralism Reads Story and Genre

Saussure's distinction between langue (the underlying system) and parole (the individual act) gives structuralism its most productive literary application: the idea that any single story (a parole) is generated by an underlying system of conventions (a langue) that the reader has unconsciously internalised. Just as you can recognise a grammatical sentence in a language you speak without being able to state its rules, you recognise a tragedy, a revenge plot, or a comic resolution because you have absorbed the genre's "grammar." Structuralist criticism sets out to describe that grammar.

This is why structuralism shades naturally into narrative theory (the subject of the next lesson). Vladimir Propp's Morphology of the Folktale (1928) is the founding instance: by analysing a corpus of Russian folktales, Propp argued that beneath their surface variety lay a fixed repertoire of thirty-one "functions" — stable units of action such as villainy, the hero's departure, the test, the reward — always occurring in the same order, regardless of which characters performed them. Tzvetan Todorov's account of narrative as a movement from equilibrium through disruption to a new equilibrium is a similarly structuralist proposition: a deep pattern underlying countless individual plots. For your essays, the payoff is concrete. When you notice that Othello obeys the grammar of revenge tragedy, or that a comedy's marriage-ending performs the genre's characteristic restoration of order, you are reading structurally — locating the individual text within the system of conventions that makes it legible. And when a text violates the expected pattern — when Top Girls puts its chronologically earliest scene last, denying the audience the reassurance of restored equilibrium — that violation becomes intensely meaningful precisely against the grammar it breaks.

Post-Structuralism

Post-structuralism does not reject structuralism but radicalises it. If meaning depends on difference (as Saussure argued), then meaning is never fully present — it is always deferred, always slipping away. This insight has revolutionary implications for how we read literature.

Roland Barthes: The Death of the Author (1967)

The Key Argument: Barthes argued that the meaning of a text is not determined by the author's intention. Once a text is written, the author is "dead" — the text belongs to the reader, who produces its meaning through the act of reading.

Traditional view	Barthes's view
The author is the source of meaning	The text is a "tissue of quotations" — a network of cultural references that the reader activates
Reading = discovering what the author "meant"	Reading = producing meaning through interpretation
One correct interpretation	Multiple, potentially infinite interpretations
The author's biography is relevant	The author's biography is irrelevant — what matters is the text and the reader

Application: If we follow Barthes, we should not ask "What did Atwood mean by The Handmaid's Tale?" but rather "What meanings does The Handmaid's Tale produce when we read it?" This is liberating: it authorises multiple readings (feminist, Marxist, post-colonial, psychoanalytic) without requiring any single reading to be "correct."

A-Level Caution: Barthes's essay does not mean "anything goes." The text constrains interpretation — not all readings are equally valid. But it does mean that the author's stated intention is not the final word.

Barthes's "Readerly" and "Writerly" Texts

In S/Z (1970), Barthes drew a further distinction that is directly useful at A-Level: between the readerly (lisible) and the writerly (scriptible) text. A readerly text positions the reader as a passive consumer of a meaning already settled; it is smooth, linear, and apparently transparent, asking only to be received. A writerly text, by contrast, makes the reader an active producer of meaning — it is open, plural, resistant to a single decoding, and demands that the reader help to construct it. The distinction is not really a sorting of books into two piles but a description of two ways of reading: even an apparently readerly classic can be read writerly, against the grain, attending to its gaps, contradictions, and surplus of meaning.

This gives you a precise way to talk about form. A novel like The God of Small Things, with its fractured chronology, invented compounds, and repetitions that withhold the full story until late, is conspicuously writerly: it refuses to hand the reader a finished meaning and forces participation in assembling one. By contrast, the apparently plain surface of a realist narrative invites readerly consumption — until a post-structuralist reading shows that its transparency is itself a constructed effect, and reads it writerly. When you argue that a text's difficulty is not an obstacle but a strategy that activates the reader, you are deploying Barthes's distinction, whether or not you name it.

Jacques Derrida: Deconstruction

The Key Argument: Derrida, the Algerian-born French philosopher, set out his thinking most influentially in Of Grammatology (De la grammatologie, 1967). He argued that Western thought is structured through binary oppositions (speech/writing, nature/culture, male/female, presence/absence) in which one term is always privileged over the other. Deconstruction is the practice of revealing these hierarchies and showing that they are unstable — that the "inferior" term is actually essential to the "superior" term. Derrida's much-quoted (and much-misunderstood) claim "il n'y a pas de hors-texte" — there is no outside-text — does not mean that nothing exists beyond books; it means there is no vantage point outside the system of signs from which meaning could be guaranteed once and for all.

Binary	Traditionally privileged term	Derrida's deconstruction
Speech / Writing	Speech (seen as immediate, authentic, present)	Writing is not secondary to speech — speech itself depends on the same structures as writing (repetition, convention, absence)
Presence / Absence	Presence	Meaning is never fully "present" — it is always deferred through the chain of signifiers (Derrida's concept of différance)
Nature / Culture	Nature (seen as original, authentic)	"Nature" is itself a cultural construction — we have no access to "nature" except through culture

Différance: Derrida coined this term (a deliberate misspelling of the French word "différence") to capture two ideas simultaneously:

Meaning is produced through difference (as Saussure argued)
Meaning is endlessly deferred — never finally arriving, always pointing to something else

Application: In Waterland, Tom Crick's compulsive storytelling can be read through Derrida's concept of différance. Tom, a history teacher whose subject is being abolished, answers his pupils' question "why?" not with an explanation but with another story, which raises another question, which prompts another story — the histories of the Fens, of his family, of the eel, of the French Revolution — so that the "meaning" of his past is endlessly deferred, never finally arriving. The novel's very form — digressive, circular, forever doubling back to correct or extend itself — enacts différance at the level of structure: the narrative behaves like a chain of signifiers that points always to a further link and never to a resting place. A deconstructive reading does not treat this as a failure of explanation; it treats the deferral as the novel's argument about history itself — that the past is not a fixed meaning to be recovered but an interminable process of re-narration. Notice, again, that the reading is anchored in the text's observable method (the recursive digressions, the unanswered "why?"), not asserted over it; that is what keeps it criticism rather than theory-display.

The Indeterminacy of Meaning

Post-structuralism argues that meaning is inherently indeterminate — never fully fixed, always open to further interpretation. This does not mean that texts are meaningless — it means that meaning is always in process, always provisional, always contestable.

Application: The ending of The Handmaid's Tale is deliberately indeterminate. We do not know whether Offred escapes or is captured; her last words — "And so I step up, into the darkness within; or else the light" — withhold even that. The "Historical Notes" add a further layer: the academics cannot verify the narrative's accuracy, its order, or even Offred's name. This indeterminacy is not a failure of the novel but its design. Meaning, like freedom, is never guaranteed — and a post-structuralist reading argues that the text formally enacts that insecurity rather than merely describing it.