Watch out for literary critics. They can get feisty.
The early structuralists were set on transforming the study of cultural phenomena into a science. They wanted to take things like language, culture, literature, and the arts and run all sorts of experiments on them, stick them into equations, and make up a bunch of formulas with Greek letters and squiggly lines. Or, more like the way a scientist studies the elements of a compound, say water, and breaks it down into two itty bitty hydrogens and one oxygen—in the same way linguists, anthropologists, and literary theorists could break down the elements of language, and culture to find the patterns and structures defining them.
For literary theorists, this scientific perspective meant approaching literature from a very different angle than that of critics before them. While non-structuralist literary critics might want to analyze what one poem sounds like and what that means, structuralists care about the relationships between a large number of poems. They tend to analyze literature in batches—like how different scientists pick their own favorite chemicals, body parts, or other areas to focus on. What matters to structuralist literary theorists isn't the one poem so much as what it tells us about the structures governing all poetry. And to understand that, they argued, we have to analyze not one poem, but lots of them.
This meant that structuralist literary theorists weren't as interested in certain things that literary critics before them took very seriously. For example, close reading: not a big deal for structuralists. Sure, we can spend hours analyzing one juicy, ambiguous line in a novel. But what's the point of wasting time, the structuralists would say, if that one little line isn't telling us anything about the structure of all novels? This, of course, scandalized all those other literary critics (especially the extra-touchy New Critics) who were all about close reading.
Same deal for things like authorial biography. Who cares what sort of relationship an author had with his or her mother? That doesn't help us understand the text. What does matter is what a writer's work tells us about the universal structure of tragic drama, or of poems, regardless of what the author's childhood was like!