Cource:M.A English
Semester:2
Batch:2016-2018
Roll No:11
Submitted to:Department of english
M.K.Bhavangar
Univercity
Email id:kavitamehta164@gmail.com
Paper no:8 Literary theory &criticism 2(The twentieth century western and Indian poetic)
Topic:What is Structuralism ? Gerard
Genette contribution in structuralism.
What is Structuralism:w
E A method of analyzing phenomena ,as
in anthropology ,linguistics,psychology,or literature,chiefly characterized by
contrasting the elemental components of the phenomena in a system of binary
opposition and examining how the elements are combined to make larger units.
In sociology ,anthropology and
linguistics,structuralism is the methodology that elements of human culture must
be understood in terms of their relationship to a larger,overarching system or
structure.It works to uncover all the things that humans do,think,perceive,and
feel.
Gerard genette:
Gerard Genette (born 1930) is a
French literary theorist,associated in particular with the structuralism
movement and such figures as Roland Barthes and Claude Levi-Strauss,from whom
he adapted the concept of bricolage.
He is largely responsible for
the reintroduction of a rhetorical vocabulary into literary criticism ,for
example such terms as trope and metonymy. Additionally his work on narrative ,best
know in English through the selection Narrative Discourse:An Essay in Method,has
been of importance.His major work is the figures series ,of which Narrative Discourse
is a section.
Gerard Genette contribution in structuralism:
Gerard Genette writes at the outset in his essay
“Structuralism and Literary Criticism “
that methods developed for the study of one discipline could be
satisfactorily applied to the study of other discipline as well.this is what he
calls “intellectual bricolage”borrowing a term from Claude Levi-Strauss .This
is precisely so,so far as structuralism is concerned .Structuralism is the name
given to Saussure’s approch to language as a system of relationship. But it is
applied also to the study of philosophy,literature and other sciences of
humanity.
In genette’s words, “if the writer
question the universe ,the critic questions literature that is to say ,the
universe of signs.But what was a sign for the writer becomes meaning for the
critic ,and in another way what was meaning for the writer becomes a sign for
the critic,as the theme and symbol of a certain literary nature.”
Gerard Genette
concept of Narratology:
This outline of Genette's Narretology is derived from Narrative Discourse: An Essay in
Method. This book forms part of his multi-volume work Figures I-III.
The examples used in it are mainly drawn from Proust's epic In Search Of Lost Time. One
criticism which had been used against previous forms of narratology was that
they could deal only with simple stories, such as Vladimir propp's work in morphology of the Folk Tale. If narratology could
cope with Proust, this could no longer be said.
Below are the five
main concepts used by Genette in Narrative Discourse: An Essay in
Method
1. Order
2. Frequency
3. Duration
4. Voice
5. Mood
1)Order:
Say a story is as follows: a murder occurs (event A); then the
circumstances of the murder are revealed to a detective (event B), finally the
murderer is caught (event C).
Arranged chronologically the events run A1, B2,
C3. Arranged in the text they may run B1 (discovery), A2 (flashback), C3
(resolution).
This accounts for the 'obvious' effects the
reader will recognise, such as flashback. It also deals with the structure of
narratives on a more systematic basis, accounting for flash-forward,
simultaneity, as well as possible, if rarely used effects. These
disarrangements on the level of order are termed 'anachrony'.
The separation between an
event and its narration allows several possibilities.
·
An event can occur once and be narrated once
o
'Today I went to the shop.'
·
An event can occur n times and be narrated once . (valour of Macbeth,
sleepless nights)
o
'I used to go to the shop.'
·
An event can occur once and be narrated in times (repetitive).
(Tess’s molestation and its aftereffect)
o
'Today I went to the shop' + 'Today he went to the shop' etc.
·
An event can occur n times and be narrated n times .
The separation between an event and its narration means that there is discource time and narrative
time. These are the two main elements of duration.
·
"Five years passed", has a lengthy discourse time,
five years, but a short narrative time (it only took a second to read).
·
James Joyce's novel Ulysses has a relatively short discourse time,
twenty-four hours. Not many people, however, could read Ulysses in twenty-four hours. Thus it is safe
to say it has a lengthy narrative time.
Voice is concerned with who narrates, and from where. This can be split
four ways .
Whare the narration is form
· Intra –diegetic:inside the text.eg.Wilie Collin’s The woman in
white.
· Extra-diegetic:outside the text.eg.Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’
Urbervilles.
Is the narrator a
character in the story.?
· Hetero –diegetic:the narrator is not a character in the story
.eg.Homer’s The Odyssey.
· Homo-diegetic:the narrator is a character in the story.eg.Emily
Bronte’s Wuthering Height.
Genette said narrative mood is dependent on the 'distance' and
'perspective' of the narrator, and like music, narrative mood has predominant
patterns. It is related to voice.
Distance of the narrator changes with narrated
speech, transposed speech and reported speech.
Perspective of the narrator is called
focalization. Narratives can be non-focalized, internally focalized or
externally focalized.
The structuralist method of criticism:
Literature
,being primarily a work of language ,and structuralism in its part,being
preeminently a linguistic method,the most probable encounter should obviously
take place on the terrain of linguistic material.Sound,forms,words and
sentences constitute the common object of the linguistic and the philologist to
much an extent that it was possible ,in the early Russian Formalist movement,to
define literature as a mere dialect,and to envisage its study as an annex of
general dialectology.
Traditional
criticism regards criticism as a message without code,Russian Formalism regards
literature as code without message.Structuralism by structural analysis makes
it possible to uncover the connection that exists between a system of forms and
a system of meanings,by replasing the search for term by term analysis with one
for over all homologies.
Gerard
believed that the structural study of ‘poetic language’ and of the forms of
literary expression cannot reject the analysis of the relation between code
message.The ambition of structuralism is not confined to confined to counting
feet and to observe the repetition of phonemes :it must also study semantic
phenomena which constitute the essence of poetic language.It is an this
reference that Genette writes:”one of the newest and most fruitful study of the
large unities of discource,beyond the framwork –which linguistics in the strict
sense can not cross-of the sentence”.one would thus study systems from a much
higher level of generality,such as narrative ,description and the other major
forms of literary expression.There would be linguistics of discourse that was a
translinguistics.
Genette
empathetically defines structuralism as a method is based on the study of
structures wherever they occur.He further adds,”But to begins with ,structures
are not directly encounterd objects-far from it,they are system of latent
relations, conceived rather than perceived,which analysis constucts as it
uncovers them ,and which it turns the risk of inventing while believing that it
is discovering them” Furthermore,structuralism is not a method ,it is also what
ernst cassirer calls a ‘general tendency of thought’or as others would say an
ideology,the prejudice of which is precisely to vallue structures at the expense
at the substances.
Genette is
of the view that any analysis that confines itself to a work without
considering its sources or motives would be implicitly sturcturalist ,and the
sturctural method ought to intervene in order to give this immanent study a
sort of rationality of understanding that would replace the rationality of
explanation abandoned with the search of causes.Unlike russian
Formalist,structuralists like Genette gave importance to thematic study also
.”Thematic analysis “,writer Genette ,”Would tend spontaneously to culminate
and to be tested in a structural synthesis in which the different themes are
grouped in networks,in order to extract their full meaning from their place and
function in the system of the work” Thus,structuralism would appear to be a
refuge for all immanent criticism against the danger of fragmentation that
threatens thematic analysis.
Genette
believes that structural criticism is untainted by any of the transcendent
reduction of phychoanalysis or marxist explanation.He further writes,”It
exerts,in its own way ,a sort of internal reduction ,traversing the substance
of the work in order its bone –structure: certainly not a superficial
examination ,but a sort of radioscopic penetration,and all the more external in
that it is more penetrating.”
Genette
observes relationship between structuralism and hermeneutics also writes: “thus
the relation that binds structuralism and hermeneutics together might not be
one mechanical separation and exclusion,but of complementarity:on the subjectof
the same work,hermeneutic criticism might speak the language of the assumption
of meaning and of internal recreation and structural criticism that of distant
speech and intelligible reconstruction.” They would ,thus,bring out
complementary significations, and their dialouge would be all the more
fruitful.
Thus
to conclude we may say ,the structuralist idea is to follow literature in its
overall evolution,while making synchronic cuts at various stages and comparing
the tables one with another.Literary evolution then appears in all its
richness,which derives from the fact that the system survives while constantly
altering.In this sense literary history becomes the history of a system .It is
the evolution of the functions that is significant,not that of the elements,and
knowledge of the synchronic relation necessarily preceds that of the processes.
Reference:
Study
matirial
M.A
english website
No comments:
Post a Comment