Structuralism

Edgar Allen Poe is an author who has wrote many stories, he has written, “The Black Cat”, “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar”, and many more. Poe tends to write stories in a way which the characters are the same. Poe has had a tremendous loss in his life and so he usually writes stories about death. His characters always appear to be dark and horrific. In the short story,”The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar”, there is a guy named M. Ernest Valdemar, he likes to have things done to him in a…

Margaret Atwood is a Canadian author mostly known for another of her titles, The Handmaid’s Tale, but she has also written pieces that explore the other fundamentals of writing and how to approach and subvert the craft to expand its horizons. This particular short story, “Happy Endings,” is in the genre of metafiction, where a writer breaks what is called “the fourth wall” and destroys the barriers between the world that is created and its creator. Examples of this have been seen throughout the…

Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills have been at the centre of Post Modernist and Post-Structuralist discourse since the 1980s. This paper will address the arguments made by Rosalind Krauss, Judith Williamson, Laura Mulvey and Jui-Ch’i Liu surrounding these film stills. The work at hand consists of a series of black and white photographs where Sherman plays the role of the director and the agent to construct an image and mise en scène that has an uncanny resemblance to 1950s snapshots of…

Since more than one hundred and seventy years ago, photography technology has been invented, such a small piece of photo has undertaken the great task of recording historical images in human history. As a result, during these hundred years, authors has started writing photography. It is undeniable that most of them describe photography techniques, such as shutter speed, aperture and ISO, etc. While still, in some great photography books, it is difficult to find any description about photography…

Throwing a Wrench into the Literary Machine: A Poststructuralist Examination of The Monkey Wrench Gang Chapter One: Statement of the Problem An army of bulldozers propels its way through a nearly vacant town, churning powerfully towards the buildings it intends to reduce to meaningless rubble. The remaining inhabitants, left powerless to negotiate with the destructionists, all share an indignant determination to ax the onslaught of the place they call home. As the mechanized gears continue to…

Looking Slumdog Millionaire Through Good and Evil In Reading Lessons, Scott Carpenter states “Structuralism is a multifaceted group of theories with varied and disparate goals” (27), explaining it is a collection of many theories and patterns which are not actually focus on a single goal but can be studied from any point of view. Structuralism doesn’t study the original purpose of creator but focus in the structure of the text or movie. Carpenter illustrates that “just because an author meant…

This essay will discuss the Star Wars universe from a structuralist view point discussing the use of stereotypical, monomyth narrative structures to represent the signified and myths of American culture. I will discuss the binaries of light, dark, alien, human, freedom, control and how there contrasting binaries relate to the negative arbitrary nature of signification. More specifically these differences of the paradigmatic and syntagmatic relationships in the movies depiction of plot, special…

Summary for the Structuralist Theory In “Reading Lessons: An Introduction to Theory”, Scott Carpenter explains the structuralism, and what the structuralist focuses on. Structuralism is defined as “a multifaceted group of theories with varied and disparate goals” (Carpenter 27). It focuses on the structure of the message or the text which includes “big ticket themes”, repeated plot, repeated images, and binary oppositions. The “big ticket themes” is like “Man versus Society, Boys meets Girls,…

A Brief Comparison Between Prague School and Danish Structuralism When we are talking about linguistic there will be 3 schools of linguistic; Structuralism, Functionalism and Behaviorism. Structuralism is the first school in psychology. Is the study of elements of consciousness, and focused on breaking down mental process into the most basic components. Structuralism is one of many branches in linguistic that understanding language through identifying and determining the structure and…

Hard Times is a novel written by Charles Dickens which judge the English society and tells us about the social and economic pressures of the 19th century. Hard Times is a Victorian novel and is very realistic. Victorian novels bring about realism in literature. Dickens novels are realistic depiction of Victorian society like class consciousness, rapid urbanization, poverty, child labor etc. Dickens talk about love, aspiration, human passion and Hard Times is a novel written by Charles Dickens…