Structuralism is interested not in the text itself or the history of the author, but solely in the work’s structure and the history of not only that structure, but also all the structures that led to that one. While I think it can be useful to look at the structure of a work and what it means for something to be written in that structure, I also think that it is impossible to get a good critical reading of a piece if your only concern is how the piece is structured and why. For example, in Prof. Rydel’s Women Writers to 1800 class, we were talking about how the form of the lai predated the fairy tale, but Marie de France’s lais still read very much like fairy tales. We then talked very briefly about Frye’s four archetypes of literature before moving on to discuss the content of the lais, which ultimately helped us analyze the lais more than determining how the fairytale and lai structures were similar.

When applying structuralism to a text, I think it becomes most useful when the author is purposefully subverting the structure, or the structure is explicitly important. One example of a structure being purposefully subverted, as we have mentioned in class a few times, is John Milton’s Paradise Lost. In the first few lines of the poem, Milton tells the reader exactly what is going to happen—the poem is an epic retelling of Genesis in which Jesus is the epic hero. Despite this, Milton subverts the reader’s expectations of an epic poem by focusing on Satan, creating the impression that he is in fact the epic hero instead. This subversion of the reader’s expectation creates an interesting dynamic between the author and the structure that I think a structuralist would run with (but I guess we’ll see for sure when we read the article about Paradise Lost).

The other time I think the structuralist criticism would be most interesting is when the structure of a piece is explicitly important. While I realize a structuralist would argue that the structure of a piece is always explicitly important, I am again more interested in what an author chooses to do with a structure. One of the most obvious examples of this is poets who write into a form—sonnet, ghazal, sestina, couplets, etc. Jericho Brown created the duplex, which he describes as, “a combination of the sonnet, the ghazal, and the blues” (jerichobrown.com). An example of a duplex can be found here: https://poets.org/poem/duplex. The structuralist perspective would be interested in the way Brown’s poem is in couplets, it has a rhyme structure, it’s got lyrical qualities, etc. There are infinite possibilities and rabbit holes in which a structuralist could dig to find the “deeper structure” of a duplex, beyond what Brown gives us in his definition of one. A structuralist would not care about Brown’s mention of abuse or him being gay—two things that feel important to the poem—and would only focus on the interconnections of the structures.

Brown, Jericho. “Poet: Jericho Brown.” Jericho Brown, http://www.jerichobrown.com/.

“The Tradition.” The Tradition, by Jericho Brown, Copper Canyon Press, 2019.