The Notion of Structure

Abstract

By the middle of the 1960s intellectual life in France, at least as far as the arts and social sciences were concerned, was dominated by structuralism. Claude Lévi-Strauss’s work in anthropology had laid the foundations for this somewhat earlier, but it was his La Pensée sauvage, which came out in 1962, that had the greatest impact on non-specialist readers. Barthes was very much influenced by him, and contributed significantly to the extension of structuralism to the study of the arts, and literary narrative in particular, with, for instance, Critique et vérité in 1966. The year 1966 also saw the publication of Althusser’s structuralist version of Marxism in Pour Marx, Foucault’s Les Mots et les choses, and Lacan’s Ecrits. By this time a kind of structuralist euphoria had taken hold of the intellectual avant-garde, often to the detriment of the more serious proponents of the theory such as the psychologist Jean Piaget, who writes astringently of the need to ‘comprendre pourquoi une notion aussi abstraite qu’un système de transformations renfermé sur lui-même peut faire naître en tous les domaines de si grands espoirs’ (1968, 8). The phenomenon was particularly evident in literary studies, where an enormous number of structuralist analyses of poetry and narrative were produced.