ABSTRACT
One cannot define structuralism by examining how the word has been used; that would lead only to despair. It may be, of course, that the term has outlived its usefulness. To call oneself a structuralist was always a polemical gesture, a way of attracting attention and associating oneself with others whose work was of moment, and to study such gestures with the seriousness and attention of scholarship would prove only that the common features of everything that has been called ‘structuralist’ are extremely common indeed. This is the conclusion one draws, for example, from Jean Piaget’s Le Structuralisme, which shows that mathematics, logic, physics, biology and all the social sciences have long been concerned with structure and thus were practicing ‘structuralism’ before the coming of Lévi-Strauss. But this use of the term leaves unexplained one important fact: why, in this case, did French structuralism seem new and exciting? Even if it be put down as just another Paris fashion, that alone argues some striking and differentiating qualities and provides prima facie reasons for assuming that there is
something, somewhere, distinctively structuralist. So rather than reject the term as hopelessly vague one should determine what meaning it must be given if it is to play a role in coherent discourse, as the name of a particular intellectual movement centred around the work of a few major figures, among whom the chief, in the field of literary studies, is Roland Barthes.
