The Big Names in Structuralism
So, remember Ferdinand de Saussure? That's right, the mustache guy. Well, he knew even more about language than about grooming that luscious facial hair. Saussure's big idea was that language is a system, or structure, made up of contrasting elements, or binary oppositions. We only understand what something is by understanding what it is not. This system of differences structures language.
Roman Jakobson was the most important of the linguists inspired by Saussure. He was a Russian linguist who ended up taking the techniques of examining language in little pieces—kind of like it's made of chemicals in a test tube—into the realm of what language actually meant. Thanks to Jakobson and other Prague School linguists, Saussure's ideas would make their way into universities the world over.
Claude Lévi-Strauss is another fellow who was exposed to Saussure's ideas through the Prague School linguists. And no, he didn't use structuralism to define jeans based on being not other pants—this was the anthropologist Lévi-Strauss.
Lévi-Strauss took ideas from structural linguistics and applied them to culture. He argued that culture is also structured like a language: on the surface, cultures may seem different, but if we dig deep enough we'll find that they're organized by the same "rules" and structures. For instance, families may be defined differently in different cultures, but something common to cultures all over the world is a taboo on incest. Marry your mom? Kind of gross. Everyone agrees on that (well, everyone but Oedipus Rex, but that's the whole point of starring in a Greek tragedy). Anyway, this is one of the foundational "rules" that all cultures share.
But why does it need to be a rule? Doesn't everyone just think it's kind of gross? Well sure, said Lévi-Strauss, but there's more to it than that. He argued that a taboo on incest is integral to all cultures because it forces people to marry strangers outside of their families. And if we have to marry strangers, then we have to form communities. And if we have to form communities, then we have to form societies. Get it? If we didn't have the incest taboo, we wouldn't have human society at all, because the taboo forces us to move away from our family, into a community, and there you have it! The roots of civilization.
Vladimir Propp was the first theorist to apply a structural approach to the study of narratives. He looked at a whole bunch of Russian folktales and tried to break them down into their basic narrative components. By studying these folktales, he came to the conclusion that all folktales can be reduced to 31 functions or "plotlines." Things like a family member leaving home, a villain inflicts some damage on the good guys, the hero ascends the throne, and they all live happily ever after. Think any Disney movie and it probably uses at least 4 of Propp's functions.
Roland Barthes was one of the earliest and most important of the structuralist literary theorists who applied structural ideas to literature. But Barthes is kind of a tricky one. He started out as a structuralist, and then later came to be associated with post-structuralism. Barthes was one of the first literary theorists to take Saussure's ideas and apply them to the study of literature. But did Barthes stop at literary narratives? Oh no! He also applied Saussure's ideas to other forms of cultural and social phenomena. He looked at fashion, at food, at the media, and tried to uncover the deep structures of meaning under all those everyday cultural phenomena.
Tzvetan Todorov is another literary theorist who took Saussure's ideas in new directions. He was buddies with Jakobson and Propp, and he believed that the literary theorist's task was to identify the underlying principles that governed works of literature. Like Barthes, he was very influential in popularizing the structuralist approach in literary studies.