Does anyone still read this stuff?
Between the mid-1960s and the late 1970s, structuralism was the hip theoretical model. But today it's considered to be as old-fashioned as the bellbottoms and flower headbands the groovier structuralists might have worn in their spare time.
The decline of structuralism began when the new kids on the block—the post-structuralists—took over. Theorists like Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault and even Roland Barthes (yup, the former structuralist—what a traitor) began questioning some of structuralism's basic assumptions. What's all this stuff about "scientific rigor"? they asked. Language and culture are big blobs of incomprehensible human activity—as if we could analyze that nonsense in the same way we do bacteria in a petri dish. So basically, there's no way the study of language and culture is a science. Why? Because linguistic and cultural structures are inherently unstable. It's in the nature of language to be ambiguous, according to Jacques Derrida—one of the biggest naysayers to Saussure's idea that it's governed by clear, logical rules and structures.
So people began to question structuralism's assumption that everything we do and say is the result of "deep structures" that are unchanging and unchangeable. If everything we do is the consequence of a sort of deep structure, doesn't that mean that we have no control over who we are, how we behave, what we say? How did we buy into that for so long, the critics wanted to know. That leaves no space for the influence of historical factors or political agency or people making their own decisions to stick it to the Man.
So poor old structuralism found itself attacked on all sides. But even though it went out of fashion, the critiques that it generated led to the creation of a whole slew of new and important theoretical schools, including post-structuralism, deconstruction and queer theory.