The first tenet of liberal humanism posits that good literature is of timeless
significance because it goes beyond the peculiarities of the age in which it is
written and connects with what is constant in human nature. In other words,
liberal humanism supports the idea of timeless literature. On the other hand,
Structuralism challenges the very first tenet of liberal humanism on the ground
that a text cannot be understood if taken out of context. Structuralists
believe in reading a text placed in its proper context as, according to them,
things cannot be understood in isolation.
Liberal
humanism was very popular towards the end of the 1800s and at the start of the 1900s because of its insistence on literature as timeless as it reveals basic
human nature that has remained unchanged over the course of history. For
liberal humanists, literature of all sorts carries universal truth that can be
applied anywhere at any given point in time. They tend to take a literary text
out of its cultural or historical context and see it as a universal truth. For
them, a good literary piece transcends time, and speak to what is constant in
human nature. Meaning lies within the text not outside of it, they emphasized.
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For
liberal humanists, literature is a vehicle through which moral truths and
teachings are conveyed. They argue that literature elevates human values and
contribute to the moral uplift of the entire humanity.
First seen in the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Roland Barthes, structuralism as an intellectual movement emerged in the 1950s in France. It is a comprehensive movement having various aspects, but if narrowed down to a single proposition that states its essence; it would be the belief that things cannot be understood in isolation; they have to be viewed in the context of larger structures they are part of. Structuralism was later imported from France to other countries such as Britain where it gained popularity as a literary theory.
The
structures we are talking about are those we have imposed through our way of
perceiving things and gaining experience rather than objective entities already
existing in the real world. In other words, meanings lie not inside things but
outside. Meanings are not the inherent quality of things, rather attributed to
them by the human mind.
To
have a structuralist reading of John Donne ‘Good Marrow’, our first reaction
would be to know about the genre of the poem. Once we know that the genre of
the poem is alba, which is a poetic tradition in which lovers lament the
approach of dawn, our next step would be to explore courtly love to understand
alba. These are the larger cultural structures that the poem is a part of. This
structuralist reading of the poem takes us away and away from the text into
larger questions of genre, history and philosophy, rather than bringing us
closer to the text. For liberal humanists, a close analysis of the poem itself
is important while for the structuralists the analysis of different structures
such as genre, courtly love and poetry is more important. Thus, in
structuralists reading of a literary work, the readers are taken farther and
farther from the text itself towards the larger abstract structures of which
the work is a part.
The
arrival of the structuralism traditions from France into the UK and the US
created a great deal of controversy because literary studies in these countries
focused on the text itself rather than trying to understand the context in
which it is written. In these countries, literary studies followed liberal
humanist traditions that looked at the text in isolation from its context.
Although,
structuralism as an academic movement began in the 1950s and 60s, however, its
roots can be traced back to the work of Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure.
According to him, language constitutes our world, it does not simply label it.
Meanings are always assigned to objects or ideas by the human mind and
expressed through language. Meanings are not in-built in objects or ideas.
Therefore language and the meanings it expresses can only be understood once
placed in proper context. For example, a particular remark in Urdu can only be
understood if we know the rules and conventions governing verbal behaviour.
This context is provided by the abstract cultural structures.
From the above discussion, it is clear that structuralism looks at the text in context to understand its meaning. Thus, structuralism does not support the first tenet of liberal humanism because things cannot be understood in isolation. They have to be seen in the context of the larger structures of which they are parts. No one can understand the much celebrated and historic document American Declaration of Independence as long as the underlying political, social, economic and historical context that precedes it is understood.
The article is written by Asif Abbas, a member at the School of Literature.
