20th-century philosophical movement that has
influenced such areas as linguistics,
anthropology, and literary criticism.
Inspired by the work of the Swiss linguist
Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913),
structuralists believe that objects should be
analysed as systems of relations, rather than
as positive entities. Saussure proposed that
language is a system of arbitrary signs,
meaning that there is no intrinsic link
between the `signifier' (the sound or mark)
and the `signified' (the concept it
represents). Hence any linguistic term can
only be defined by its differences from other
terms. His ideas were taken further by Roman
Jakobson (1896-) and the Prague school of
linguistics, and were extended into a general
method for the social sciences by the French
anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss. The
French writer Roland Barthes took the lead in
applying the ideas of structuralism to
literary criticism, arguing that the critic
should identify the structures within a text
that determine its possible meanings,
independently of any reference to the real.
This approach is radicalized in Barthes'
later work and in the practice of
`deconstruction', pioneered by the French
philosopher Jacques Derrida (1930-). Here the
text comes to be viewed as a `decentred' play
of structures, lacking any ultimately
determinable meaning.