Marina Grishakova
In the early 1950s, the Parisian intellectual scene was jolted by the Sartre–Camus controversy and rupture. In his impassioned response to The Rebel (1951), Sartre blamed Camus for what he felt to be the renunciation of historical responsibility and commitment. In the background of the public feud between two prominent intellectuals, Roland Barthes’s covert polemics with Sartre were less noticeable, though no less significant. Although Barthes claimed himself to be a Marxist and Sartrean in the postwar years, his Writing Degree Zero (1953; early portions had appeared in Camus’s Combat from 1947 through 1950) disputed the Sartrean conception of socially responsible literature. Camus’s The Rebel, Sartre’s What is Literature? (1947) and Barthes’s Writing Degree Zero are three key texts that suggest three basic ways of defining literature’s role and position in society. Highlighting a writer’s individual responsibility, Camus sees literature as a kind of a negative, rebelling Other with regards to society. Sartre, on the other hand, considers literature a form of direct social engagement and language its tool. For Barthes, literature’s social engagement is indirect and mediated by language, style, and “writing.” Both the author and the reader are enclosed in a horizon of language, that is, a set of inadvertently adopted linguistic norms and habits. “Style” stems from the raw, bodily material of the author’s memory and past. As with language, however, it is pre‐given rather than chosen. In contrast, writing, which may be defined as a system of signs distinctive for literature as a specific institution, offers the writer a choice to position his work within history and social space. Writing Degree Zero is a proto‐structuralist work informed by the awareness of the mediating, both confining and constitutive, nature of language. While retaining systemic features of language, literature develops its own distinctive system of signs. Whereas later critiques of structuralism’s inability to engage with historical and social contexts (e.g. Jameson 1975) echo Sartrean arguments, Barthes’s works testify to the fact that structuralism lacks neither social sensibility nor a sense of historical change, because language, literature, and other symbolic systems were viewed by structuralists as social facts ratified by a kind of tacit social consensus. What remains problematic and disputed, however, is the very concept of structure.
The structuralist conception of language derives from Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics (1916). In this foundational text compiled from lecture notes and posthumously published by his disciples, Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure formulated a concise argument about the systemic nature of language, as a self‐regulating system that forges its own “reality” instead of being a transparent window on reality, and the relational identity of its elements. For Saussure, language is a rule‐based system of elements and their relationships whose functioning is similar to chess, where the relational value but not the material substance of chess pieces matters. Saussure distinguished between language (langue) as a system of rules and norms and speech (parole) as all instances of its use in practice. The linguistic turn, informed by the Kantian tradition in philosophy, was part of a broader movement—exchange and spread of structuralist ideas across the natural and social sciences and the study of cultural practices. The structural‐systemic way of thinking in terms of systemic wholes and their transformations rather than isolated facts or aggregations proved productive in many fields. However, in his 1968 book Structuralism, Jean Piaget had already referred to the potential openness and extensibility of closed formal systems that spread in contemporary science—as a counterweight to the Saussurean static structuralism. For instance, Gödel’s incompleteness theorems demonstrate that the limits of mathematical formalization are “moveable” or “vicarious”: “there are, in addition to formalized levels of knowledge, distinct “semi‐formal” or “semi‐intuitive” levels” not formalizable within the given system (Piaget 1970: 35). Human sciences develop on the assumption of incomplete, changing knowledge that depends “on interplay of anticipation and feedback” (1970: 16)—this kind of open‐ended dynamics introduces the factor of time into systemic‐structural descriptions.
Whereas in linguistics and literary studies where the influence of Saussure and Formalism was initially most strong, the spread of synchronic formal models describing the state of a system at a moment in time rather than in development was typical of early structuralism, there has also been rising awareness of insufficiency of isolated synchronic descriptions and the rise of alternative models, such as “history (diachrony) of systems” and “system‐systemic approach,” involving multiple levels of structuration and the dynamics between the system and its environment (context). However, it was precisely the Saussurean conception of synchrony that revealed the inherent complexity of seemingly simple organizations, each systemic element (sign) appearing at the intersection of multiple syntagmatic and paradigmatic series. An element of language (sign) is deemed to be in syntagmatic relation to other, complementary elements with which it can combine in a sequence, such as sentence, narrative, cinematic shot, pictorial composition, or a menu, in the case of “culinary language.” The paradigmatic relation contrasts the sign to a set of similar signs for which it can substitute in various contexts, such as different forms of a single verb, synonyms of a single word, or choices of the same menu slot, for instance “desserts.”
The idea of tracing a history of literature’s systemic development is at the focus of Roman Jakobson and Yuri Tynianov’s 1928 essay, “Problems in the Study of Literature and Language,” a text documenting a transition from Russian Formalism to Structuralism, but also a landmark of the dynamic‐structuralist approach. It aimed at a revision of the Saussurean framework, overcoming the opposition between synchrony and diachrony by assessing the interplay of system and history, and by acknowledging the complexity of every synchronic state, both in terms of temporality—the system’s future and past states being inherent in the present—and in terms of what Tynianov and Jakobson called the systemic dominant (each state of the system encompassing an interplay of various asynchronous “series” such as literature, arts, social and private life, politics, etc.). The interest in diachronic states of the system, which are less determinate and less available for formalization, is also prominent in Jakobson’s linguistic works, starting from the late 1920s (Holenstein 1976: 31f.). These and similar ideas of systemic dynamics and development have been adopted in various projects from the 1960s through the 1980s, for instance Jacques Dubois’s conception of “literary institution” (Dubois 1978), Siegfried Schmidt’s system‐systemic approach (Schmidt 1982), Itamar Even‐Zohar’s polysystem theory (Even‐Zohar 1990), and, ultimately, applications of dynamic systems frameworks in literary and cultural studies (Lotman 2009; Hayles 1999, among others). Semiotics appears as a natural extension of systemic approaches demonstrating that no artefact, medium, or system stands alone.
Historians of structuralism (Dosse 1991; Sturrock 1986: Petitot 1985: Holenstein 1976: Piaget 1968, to name just a few) pointed out certain proto‐structuralist ideas in philosophy, psychology, and other fields. Phenomenology proved to be important in its double role as both an adversary and an ally. Husserl’s phenomenological method of reduction or “bracketing” historical reality for the sake of rigorous description of structures of consciousness, through which objects constitute themselves, dovetails with the structuralist interest in pre‐subjective subconscious structures of language and social reality. Jakobson was inspired by ideas from Husserl’s Logical Investigations (Holenstein 1976: 2–3, 19). Works by Polish phenomenologist and aesthetician Roman Ingarden, and German linguist and psychologist Karl Bühler, both of whom were much indebted to Husserl, also impacted the development of literary structuralism. Further, Merleau‐Ponty’s revision of the Husserlian project by connecting phenomenology with empirical science and Saussurean linguistics and his interest in proffered structures of signification in perception served as important impulses for structuralist developments in France.
Although, according to Dosse, Foucault “dealt a final blow to the phenomenological project” by shifting the focus of structuralist thinking onto the history of social practices and institutions (Dosse 1998 I: 41), linguistics, psychology, and other fields retained the phenomenological impulse. For instance, Greimassian structural semantics is rooted in perception and greatly indebted to Merleau‐Ponty’s phenomenology: it demonstrates that the structures of perception contribute to the articulation of meanings in language (Greimas 1966). Other important predecessors of structuralism were psychologists like Husserl’s teacher Franz Brentano, structural psychologists like Edward Titchener, and Gestalt psychologists like Kurt Koffka and Wolfgang Köhler who advocated the primacy of perceptual structures and dynamics of organized wholes over separate sensations or their associations.
From Goethe’s proto‐structuralism to C. H. Waddington (1968–1972) and Brian Goodwin (1996), structuralist biology offers explanatory alternatives and amendments to neo‐Darwinism. Whereas the latter “obscures the intelligibility of morphological phenomena,” “reduces them to a by‐product of evolutionary chance” (Petitot 2004: 31), and subordinates the significance of the living organism’s internal organization to the external pressures of natural selection and environmental adaptation, structuralist biology stresses the importance of self‐regulation and developmental choices. Such post‐Darwinian evolutionary models, which complement or challenge the predominance of neo‐Darwinism in contemporary biology, introduce the concept of teleology that restricts the impact of both deterministic causality and randomness: the environment triggers changes, but the character of these changes depends also on organism’s self‐regulation and structural stability. Similarly, structuralism in the humanities also calls attention to regularities and laws of form, to its materiality and morphology, to the fact that its emergence and evolution are not reducible to external factors. Owing to the spread of structural‐systemic thinking, the traditional forms of historical, genetic‐causal explanations were replaced with teleological and functional models. From the structuralist perspective, a work of literary art is not conceivable solely in terms of author’s biography, societal pressures, or influences and sources. Jakobson ridiculed traditional literary history by comparing it with the police who, upon arriving at the crime scene, arrest everyone they happened to find there, including chance passers‐by (Erlich 1980: 71). Instead, Jakobson argued, literature’s genesis and functioning are mediated by its own systemic connections and formative principles, and the work’s position in relation to the whole sociocultural field. As Jakobson put it in his defense of formalist‐structuralist ideas: “Neither Tynjanov nor Mukařovský nor Šklovskij nor I—none of us has ever proclaimed the self‐sufficiency of art. What we have been trying to show is that art is an integral part of the social structure, a component that interacts with all the others and is itself mutable since both the domain of art and its relationship to the other constituents of the social structure are in constant dialectical flux.”1
Piaget claimed that while, “the logician’s formal structures are fabricated ad hoc” but that “what structuralism is after is to discover ‘natural structures’” (Piaget 1968: 30). Nevertheless, there remains a degree of uncertainty as to how the structures are obtained, whether they are “given” (from the ontological, realist perspective) or “posited” (from the epistemological, nominalist viewpoint, see Petitot 1985: 23–4). In other words, are they inherent in phenomena, or the objects of study? Or are they constructed in researcher’s mind? Obviously, structures are not detachable from substance, they are higher (supervenient) orders of organization that can be inferred from material forms, as in pairs such as langue and parole (Saussure), code and message (Jakobson), phoneme and allophone (Jakobson, Trubetskoy), where the first term refers to the virtual, the second to the actual tangible entity. While approaching artefacts and cultural practices, the observer meets a material resistance of the form whose meaning he is able to access only by capturing its organizing principles and functions rather than ascribing a pre‐given meaning to it. The form does not convey ready, pre‐given ideas; it constitutes a new meaningful object. As Ducrot observes in his chapter in the manifesto collection Qu’est‐ce que le structuralisme?, if “structure” is understood as a form of organization, the study of linguistic structures is as old as the study of language itself. The novelty of structuralism consists in extending the idea of formal organization to film, literature, mythology, and other cultural practices (Ducrot 1968: 16) with their different forms of structuration. In this new capacity, the concepts of “language” and “structure” may have a reductive and homogenizing effect (if they are reduced to a direct analogy with the natural language system) or an emancipating effect (if properly understood as a distinct system of expression and meaning‐making). While highlighting the specifics of those different “languages,” the formalist‐structuralist methods, as compared with previous biographical, or naive‐psychological approaches, introduced a more technical and analytical vocabulary contingent on the description of specific material practices in literary and cultural studies and, consequently fostering emancipation and maturation of these disciplinary fields.
There remains a degree of uncertainty and doubt, however, as to how and whether the concept of structure is applicable to these fields. This has led to some critics being reluctant to see structuralism in literature and arts as a method at all, let alone a rigorous method (Boudon 1968: 227–9). In some structuralist works, structural descriptions are generated in accordance with the rules of formal or natural logic adopted by linguistics and semiotics, by applying the operational rules to the inventory of basic formal units. For instance, Barthes adopted from Hjelmslev the notions of “metalanguage” and “connotation”, as secondary‐order levels of signification or meaning‐making, to describe various semiotic systems (such as modern mythology, advertising, and fashion, in Barthes 1957 and 1967), as secondary systems built on top of the primary system of natural language and endowing it with new cultural and ideological meanings.2 In The Fashion System (1967), Barthes explores syntagmatic and paradigmatic relations of different items of clothing and their functions in the system of fashion. Slavic structuralism(s) and functionalism(s)—Czech, Polish, Tartu‐Moscow—worked with structural and stratification models of language where lower‐level units (phonemes, morphemes, lexemes) fuse into higher‐level units. In literary works, which include, besides linguistic, a number of supra‐ and extralinguistic levels, lower‐level units (even meaningless in natural language) may link directly to higher levels. They become meaningful by bringing units of higher levels (often unrelated in natural language) into relations of equivalence or contrast.3 The greater the number of formal restraints and semantic connections that each textual unit enters the richer the work’s semantic (meaning‐generating) potential (Lotman 1977).4 From this perspective, the poetic language is not a “deviant” version of everyday language, as Shklovsky maintained, but an intensification of language’s natural creativity (Jakobson 1985: 92). Slavic scholars developed projects of generative poetics inspired by Chomsky’s generative grammar and computational linguistics (e.g. Revzin 1966). Structuralist narratology (works by Algirdas Julien Greimas, Gérard Genette, Seymour Chatman, Gerald Prince) is also rooted in linguistic and rhetorical frameworks.
Conversely, “structures” may also refer to underlying categories and conceptual distinctions that articulate basic perceptions, cognitions, emotions, and other anthropological constants. For instance, myth, as it is described by Claude Lévi‐Strauss in Mythologiques, reflects subconscious activities of the mind projected onto the sphere of social life5 and performs a problem‐solving function: it polarizes certain phenomena and objects salient in the life of a culture and suggests a resolution of those polarities (for instance, “hunting” as a mediating link between the polarity of “warfare” and “agriculture,” or “carrion‐eating animals” between “herbivores” and “predators”). The Greimassian actantial model (developed in Greimas 1966) embraces six basic communicative positions (roles), which include Subject/Object, Helper/Opponent, Sender/Receiver, and their interaction on the axes of knowledge, power, and desire. The model applies to both the structure of a sentence and to a sequence of action, or plot. The basic narrative schemes, as described by Todorov (1977), Bremond (1973), and Eco (1979), manifest a dynamics of movement from the state of disequilibrium caused by some kind of transgression, violation or lack, through a series of reparatory actions and choices that may lead either to failure or success, to a further disequilibrium or a new equilibrium. These basic plot schemes reverberate with the anthropological conception of social drama in Victor Turner’s work (1967, 1969), where drama is regarded as a social reparatory mechanism triggering the development from breach and crisis to resolution or integration of change in social life. These are structures that constitute or mediate human realities of perception, cognition, verbal, and nonverbal behavior, be it a boxing match, eating or love‐making, naively taken for granted as natural by the actors. In the denaturalization of seemingly spontaneous practices, revealing the underpinnings of these practices, lies a significant critical potential of structuralism.6
The “structure” may also refer to formative principles, conventions, or salient systemic features of specific texts or groups of texts, for example, in Todorov’s works on structure and typology of the plot in detective or fantastic fiction. Likewise, five “codes” (proairetic, hermeneutic, semic, symbolic, and referential) isolated by Barthes in his interpretation of Balzac’s story “Sarrasine” could hardly be identified with an abstracted meta‐system or metalanguage, such as the Saussurean langue or Jakobson’s “code” (Barthes 1970; see also Culler 1975: 236–9). Instead, they are co‐extensive with specific narrative and textual functions and strategies. The list of codes is extendable to other literary works but has been created as ad hoc tools for a specific interpretative task: as a list, it is open‐ended and only weakly systematic. However, Barthes’s subtle analysis of Balzac’s realistic story succeeded in showing what had been theorized also by Jakobson and other structuralists—that not only experimental or avant‐garde but also realist works and the concept of “realism” itself are constructions, despite their illusionary “natural” mimetic transparency. Similarly, structuralist‐semiotic studies in visual arts subvert seemingly natural connections between the photographic image and its referent.
In sum, various trends, schools, and authors whom handbooks and textbooks bring together under the umbrella term “structuralism” have different ideas of structure and different views on the role of systemic thinking in the humanities. From this perspective, “structuralism” does not refer to a single framework or theory. Rather, there are various “structuralisms” and various conceptions of structure. Nevertheless, it would hardly be possible to ignore or deny an epistemological shift associated with structuralist‐systemic thinking that prompted the modernization of the humanities in the twentieth century. While distinguishing between two views on science—Baconian and Keplerian—Emmon Bach identifies structuralism with the latter (Bach 1965). The Baconian approach is inductive: it moves through observation and experiment to limited generalization based on empirical data. The Keplerian approach, extremely successful in mathematics and natural science, involves a creative leap to a general hypothesis that is judged by its explanatory power and fruitfulness. The fruitfulness of a rigid conception of structure and the traffic of linguistic models to other, “soft” sciences has been disputed. Nevertheless, structuralism sharpened the analytical tools and enriched the toolkits of the humanities. Theorizing in literary and art studies assumed a form of rational inquiry, “putting forth claims that can be learned and taught […] and subject to standard rules of reasoning and argumentation” (Margolin 2009: 41). Structuralist vocabularies are revisited and structuralist hypotheses tested by the new frameworks of cognitive science, neuroscience, cultural and evolutionary biology, and empirical aesthetics.
Although these “structuralisms” emerge as separate and often unconnected trends of what may seem a single movement, certain conceptual overlappings and adaptations contribute to historical continuity. The first decades of the twentieth century (1910–1940s) witnessed a development of structural and descriptive linguistics, formalist poetics and the “new criticism” of different varieties on both sides of the Atlantic, as well as the spread of formalisms in art studies (such as those of Alois Riegl, Heinrich Wölfflin, and Henri Focillon), all forming the bedrock of structuralism. While the natural development of Russian Formalism was thwarted by the ideological pressures and increasingly sinister political situation in the Soviet Union, the formalist tradition managed to live on. There were scholars who bridged the formalist and structuralist developments in various contexts, Jakobson probably being the most prominent and active among them. Besides initiating and mediating different structuralist circles and trends, Jakobson is famous for his remarkable productivity in a wide range of fields including comparative, historical and structural linguistics, neurolinguistics, verse studies, folklore studies, literary theory, aesthetics, and semiotics. Petr Bogatyrev, who is well known for his applications of structural‐semiotic methods in anthropology and ethnographic studies,7 and Nikolai Trubetskoy, a founder of phonology as a separate discipline, mediated between Russian Formalism and the Prague functionalist‐structuralist tradition. Following in Saussure’s footsteps, Trubetskoy distinguished between the study of actual speech sounds (phonetics) and the study of underlying systems of phonic differential features (phonology) linked with the differences of meaning in various languages. Founded in 1926, the Prague linguistic circle published eight volumes of its multilingual works in Travaux du Cercle linguistique de Prague (1929–1939). The impact of structural linguistics was definitive in the Prague circle’s early years.
However, extensions of what began as research on natural creativity inherent in language to literary and art studies developed into sovereign research fields. Literary scholars Jan Mukařovsky and Felix Vodička actively entered the scene in the 1930s and 1940s, respectively. Mukařovsky developed principles of structural poetics and semiotics of art by introducing the dynamic factor of aesthetic value (maintained by the work itself and by the audience) set against a background of historically relative norms and conventions. The interplay between aesthetic form (structure), value judgment and norm defines the permutation of such structures and norms, and brings poetics closer to the history and sociology of literature and arts. Mukařovsky’s discussion of the polyfunctionality of a work of art is in tune with Bogatyrev’s observations on folkloric and ethnographic objects that perform multiple functions with a dominant function changing over time and across different contexts (Galan 1985: 55): one might consider in this connection the magical, religious, and aesthetic functions of the Christmas tree, or of statuettes of exotic deities that, detached from the original religious context, retain only an aesthetic function. Drawing on Ingarden’s conception of “concretization” and Mukařovsky’s ideas of the structural evolution of literature and art, Vodička worked on reception theory and related it to the study of aesthetic and social norms that define and delimit value judgments. The younger generation of the Prague school faced a difficult choice between emigration (chosen by Lubomir Doležel who continued his career in Toronto University) and working in isolation under growing ideological and political pressure after the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. Miroslav Červenka, one of Mukařovsky’s students, endured his teacher’s 1951 recantation under political pressure, and survived to see the rehabilitation of the formalist‐structuralist movement in the 1990s.
In Poland, Manfred Kridl was a leading figure of modern literary theory in the pre‐World War II period. He developed his formalist‐structuralist “integral method” and assembled a group of young scholars in Vilnius University. Kridl’s student Renata Mayenowa became a prominent figure in postwar Polish structuralism and semiotics, an advocate of logical and mathematical methods. Together with Stefan Žolkiewski, Mayenowa’s role was prominent in the international semiotic movement (Kola and Ulicka 2015).
Early formalist and structuralist traditions developed in the Tartu‐Moscow school (TMS) of semiotics starting from the early 1960s. The emergence of the School became possible owing to the rapprochement of Moscow and Tartu groups, Yuri Lotman’s organizational effort, and the unfavorable conditions in Moscow where structural linguistics and poetics, information theory, and exact methods still remained under considerable ideological pressure despite the political thaw of the 1960s. The TMS community organized summer schools and published the periodical Sign Systems Studies in Tartu. TMS scholars worked on Indo‐European languages and mythologies, Buddhist philosophy, religious rituals and arts, semiotics of culture, poetics and semiotics of literature, verse theory, narratology, urban semiotics, and neurosemiotics. While guided by the formalist and early structuralist impulse but transcending the restrictive linguistic analogy, Lotman explored in The Structure of the Artistic Text (1977) the semiotic “multilinguality” of artistic texts, the ability of a work of art to generate new semiotic languages, and the capacity of an individual case, initially perceived as a deviation, to become a cultural value and norm.8 Lotman developed his original framework of the “semiotics of everyday behavior” and researched infiltrations between literature and byt (literary or aesthetic mores, the literary everyday). Both Yuri Lotman and Boris Uspensky delved into the issues of semiotics and poetics of narrative (plot, character, point of view). In his Poetics of Composition (1970), Uspensky addresses the double—verbal and visual, diegetic and mimetic—nature of a literary work, and draws on both verbal and pictorial semiotics to elucidate the dynamics of point of view. Eleazar Meletinsky and Valdimir Toporov’s studies in neo‐mythological poetics traced historical and context‐specific transformations of mythological plots and explored their role as interpretative tools or “metalanguages” of culture. The TMS 1973 manifesto Theses on the Semiotic Study of Cultures, co‐authored by Lotman, Uspensky, Ivanov, Toporov, and Pyatigorsky, was immediately published in English (see Theses 1973) and later translated into French and Italian, among other languages.
Fortunately, the “iron curtain” was not entirely impenetrable. Works by Russian Formalists became available in English and French in the 1960s, the Prague school works in poetics and aesthetics in the 1950s, and Tartu‐Moscow school works in the early 1970s. The ideas of Slavic structuralisms and semiotics were actively adopted—polemically or positively—by the Tel‐Aviv school of poetics and semiotics, by the Konstanz group Poetics and Hermeneutics and other research groups and circles.
Jakobson, who had been teaching at the New School in New York during the 1940s, introduced formalist and structuralist work to the fellow émigré Lévi‐Strauss. They attended one another’s lectures, and “it was Jakobson who, in 1943, advised Lévi‐Strauss to begin writing his thesis that would become The Elementary Structures of Kinship” (Dosse 1998: I, 12), a study inspired by the success of phonology, structural linguistics, and semiology. In France, structuralism appeared within a broad context of existentialist, phenomenological, Marxist, psychoanalytical, feminist theories and philosophies. It quickly metamorphosed, however, and formed hybrid combinations with these theories and philosophies, served as a revolutionary and revisionary tool, was critiqued by its opponents as highbrow academic mandarinism but to its adherents was a sign of cutting‐edge thinking. In its application to literature, structuralism was part of the “new critical” (la nouvelle critique) movement in Europe, aimed at contesting traditional, positivist, and naive‐psychological paradigms. The polemics between traditional Sorbonne scholar Raymond Picard and Roland Barthes over the latter’s revolutionary treatise on Racine, which Barthes summarized in Critique et verité (1966), was the watershed.9 In the debate between the old Sorbonne and “la nouvelle critique,” it soon became clear that the literary work, ceasing to be a sacred object, appears to be a constructed object (Dion 1993: 14). A question arose, then, on how to approach this complex object. The line of division runs between those structuralists who used a value‐neutral metalanguage, distanced from the language of a research object, and those who preferred a more “engaged” language, balancing between the “scientific” and non‐academic criticism. The former group includes Claude Brémond, Tzvetan Todorov, A. J. Greimas, Gérard Genette, Umberto Eco, Christian Metz, and their disciples and other followers. The latter group includes Julia Kristeva, Michel Foucault, and other intellectuals whose works paved the way to the poststructuralist movement. Barthes eventually detached himself from structuralism in the late 1960s.
But both groups would have agreed with certain key statements of the Barthes rejoinder to Picard’s La nouvelle critique ou nouvelle imposture (1965), particularly the idea that the traditional criticism is biased by silent presumptions of “good taste,” “clarity,” and “common sense” and presents the critic’s own preferences and historical prejudices as an “objective method”; otherwise it demonstrates an unreflexive attitude as regards its own approaches and procedures. Earlier, in the 1964 collection Essais critiques, and in accordance with Jakobson, Barthes found traditional criticism lacking interpretative procedures and operating by analogy, that is, looking for historical, biographical, psychological analogues outside the work itself. Both groups would have agreed that the use of contemporary theories in the study of old texts is justified. However, they would have, obviously, disagreed on which theories and frameworks are particularly efficient.
The first group worked with theories and metalanguages built on linguistic, logic, rhetoric‐theoretical, semiotic, or mathematical foundations. Rhetorical models were perceived by many structuralist scholars as a means of renewing and updating structuralism. For example, General Rhetoric (1970) and The Rhetoric of Poetry (1977) by the Belgian Groupe μ combined classical rhetoric with structural‐semiotic conceptions of language (particularly those by Jakobson and Hjelmslev) but also introduced a pragmatic perspective to show how linguistic and extralinguistic factors work together to produce rhetorical effects on the reader in various types of communication. Similarly, Genette protested against a reduction of rhetoric to tropology, the study of traditional figures and, in his 1970 essay “Rhetoric Restrained,” called for a revision of rhetoric as a semiotics of all discourse, the project he aimed at in his magisterial Figures (I–III:, 1966–70, IV–V, 1999–2000).
In Kristeva, late Barthes and other Tel Quel authors, structuralist discourse and critical method were married with psychoanalysis, Marxism, feminism, and other ideological discourses, and translated into the practice of writing. While engaging with psychoanalysis and non‐orthodox, broadly understood Marxism, Kristeva actively propagated Bakhtin’s aesthetic and philosophy, and adapted Bakhtinian concepts of heteroglossia, hybridity, and dialogism to the study of transformative power of discourse that alters the system and logic of language. Later, the Bakhtinian concepts were re‐appropriated by Homi Bhabha and other postcolonial critics. Kristeva aimed at the revision and reformulation of the semiotic project in terms of subject: for her, the transformative and subversive power of discourse extended to both social structures and subject (Kristeva 1969). The pairing of theorizing and the practice of writing is prominent also in Tel Quel’s collective work Théorie d’ensemble (Group Theory 1968), which marks the turn of the review towards the ideologically engaged textual practices and deconstruction (ffrench 2015).
Research for this chapter was supported by the Estonian Research Council (Grant PUT192) and by the European Union Regional Development Fund (CEES).