Structuralistic Criticism and Gerard Genette

In the article “Intertextuality and the Discourse Community” James Porter points out to the audience that there is no original piece or writing. Porter’s article addresses the concept of plagiarizing. He does not oppose that plagiarizing is wrong, rather he claims that it is inevitable. Porter argues that in all pieces of writing are intertexual. Intertexuality is the idea that all writings have traces and ideas from other past text. Intertextuality is important to completely understand a piece of writing.

The formalist method of literary criticism is primarily focused on the text itself, rather than external topics such as history and background, the author's biographical information, or the social contexts which surround a piece of work. In the formalist perspective, we ask ourselves, why did the author choose to write his or her work in this specific style? Why did he or she choose to include certain literary elements? "What matters most to the formalist critic is how the work comes to mean what it does--how its resources of language are deployed by the writer to convey meaning" (DiYanni 2076). A reader can employ the formalist method to decipher many meanings in Mary Shelley's classic text Frankenstein. Shelley uses setting,

New Criticism posits that in order to understand a work, one must focus solely on the work looking at, for example, its figures of speech among other elements and how such add to the organic unity (the coming together

To create a piece of fabric, small textile fibers are crisscrossed, stitched, and sewn together. If unraveled, the individual fibers remain, but as a whole, they function collectively to make a larger and more significant piece. This is known as weaving, and it is argued by some literary researchers that this process of weaving can be figuratively applied to procedures of writing by way of intertextuality―the composition theory that claims all texts refer to other texts. From this assertion, James E. Porter’s “Intertextuality and the Discourse Community,” argues originality is nearly impossible to achieve, as no thought originates without influence from other sources; however, after examining the essays “All Writing is Autobiography” by Donald

New historicism is premised upon an ideological attempt to wed the practice of history and literary criticism. In this type of textual analysis, the literary work is juxtaposed with historical events (characteristic of the time period in which the work was produced) in an effort to understand the implications within the text. This line of inquiry serves to recover a "historical consciousness" which may be utilized in the rendering of literary theory. "Poems and novels came to be seen in isolation, as urnlike objects of precious beauty. The new historicists, whatever their differences and however defined, want us to see that even the most unlike poems are caught in a web of historical conditions,

New Historicism is a school of criticism that is “influenced by structuralist and post-structuralist theories, [and] seeks to reconnect a work with the time period in which it was produced and identify it with the cultural and political movements of the time” (Purdue Owl). With this school of criticism, every work that is created is considered a product of the moment in history that it references. Historical criticism insists that readers need to understand

Structural Functionalism is a paradigm based on the assumption that society is a unified whole that functions because of the contributions of its separate structures (Ferris and Stein

Foucault’s contribution to literary studies has been to encourage us to think about how no writer’s description or categorization is simply neutral. Instead we can think

In sociology, there are three major theories. These theories are Structural Functionalism, Conflict Theory and Symbolic Interaction. There are many people who have influenced all three of these theories. Although not all of these theories are still used much now, the thoughts and views that emerged from these theories are still referenced to this day. Ideas used in these theories helped shape new theories and teach us a lot about understanding society and what shapes it.

Formalist critics are primarily concerned with the language, structure, and tone of a work, otherwise known, as it’s “formal elements”. Formalists gravitate towards “intrinsic” matters in a piece of literature, in simpler terms, diction, irony, paradox, metaphor, and symbol. In a similar fashion, they emphasize larger elements, for instance, plot, characterization, and narrative technique, in order to derive meaning from a literary work. The work must stand by itself, and any information that goes beyond the text, for example, biography, history, politics, and

In “An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory” Bennett and Royle, explore topics such as subjectivity and ideology. In the Chapters “Me” and Ideology”, Bennett and Royle are able to define the terms as well as suggest how they are interrelated or interconnected. Bennett and Royle contend that literature replicates structures of ideology while encouraging subjects to question personal idenitity. They believe “subjects – people – make their own ideology at the same time as ideology makes them subjects” (Bennett and Royle 202). Stevens exemplifies Bennett and Royles contentions by building his ideologies around his profession as a bulter at the risk of losing himself to the subjection of his ideologies in which he can never be alone and cannot exist without his profession or the justications of his profession.

Literary structure can be defined by the organizational method of a written material. It’s the basic and outline of your story. With that in mind you decide to develop your literary structure before all else. You think of another novel for an example. In the classic book Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley there is an interesting structure.

The first author’s main point introduces the structuralist theory. Incorporating the ideas of Anthony Giddens the authors emphasize that structuration rejects the concepts of structure and agency and instead connects these two ideas by looking at individual interactions in a particular event and location. Using this theoretical framework the authors examine the activities

The primary theme of la Fournier’s[1] analysis of Marxist class is a mythopoetical paradox. An abundance of discourses concerning deconstructive capitalism exist. But the subject is added into a dialectic paradigm of reality that includes culture as a reality. If one examines structuralist dematerialism, one is faced with a choice: either reject postcultural dialectic theory or conclude that narrativity is used to exploit the Other. Many narratives concerning the genre, and therefore the futility, of pretextual society may be found. Therefore, we have to choose between expressionism and the subtextual paradigm of narrative. A number of dematerialisms concerning capitalist narrative exist. Structuralist dematerialism views imply that context must come from the collective unconscious. It could be said that any number of discourses concerning not desemanticism, but postdesemanticism may be revealed.

the whole novel: “the linguistic pattern of choices realizes a primitive pattern of cognition, which in turn is the key to the tragic vision of the novel.”(Leech & Short, 2001: 32) Halliday being the widely acknowledged precursor of functional stylistics, the eminent German linguist-critic Leo Spitzer (1887-1960), is likewise father of literary stylistics. In his insistence that the smallest detail of language can unlock the “soul” of a literary work, he maintains the task of stylistics is to provide a hard-and-fast technology of analysis: I would maintain that to formulate observation by means of words is not to cause the artistic beauty to evaporate in vain intellectualities; rather, it makes for a widening and deepening of the aesthetic taste. It is only a frivolous love that cannot survive intellectual definition; great love prospers with understanding. (Leech & Short, 2001: 2) A question which is often asked in this connection is “At which end do we start, the aesthetic or the linguistic?” The image used by Spitzer of the “philological circle”, the circle of understanding, however, seems to suggest there is no logical staring point. Spitzer argues that the task of Linguistic-literary explanation proceeded by the movement to and fro from linguistic details to the