| From the end of19th century to the middle20th century, classical humanities, especially pragmatism reigned Europe. In order to challenge the authorities of Scholasticism and achieve the anti-cultural purpose, French structuralism, under the dual influence of Russian formalism and the Prague School, appeared on stage. Roland Barthes(1915-1980),the founder of structuralism, is one of the most important representative of the school. Having read Saussure, Hjelmslev, Jacobson extensively, he tried to establish a discipline on semiosis to describe the generating mechanism of textual meanings. After his re-interpretation of the relationships among language, sign, and text, Barthes found, by studying popular culture, the mythological structure of bourgeois ideology hidden in language, whose patterns of signification he later described. In order to interpret the generation of textual meanings, he designed a set of narrative syntax to depict the syntagmatic relation for text. Like other structuralists, he was severely criticized by orthodox scholastics. Barthes didn’t hesitate; instead, upon summarizing and introspecting, he took in Bakhtin’s Polyphony Theory through Julia Kristeva’s introduction and proposed the ideas such as text of "plurality","intertextuality","jouisance", etc., which marked his transition into the realm of post-structuralism, whereby he was satirized as "the chameleon of structuralism". However, it is exactly for Barthes’understanding, improving, denying, and deconstructing, that he enjoyed a privileged position in the field of structuralism, and a position in that of deconstructionism. His pursuit for scientific reasoning and rigorous logical argumentation has provided for the work of analyzing structuralist texts with technical support. What’s even more admirable is his spirit of self-deconstruction. This dissertation intends to clarify the transitions along the formation of Barthes’ semiology, and to make clear the operability of his structuralist methods, in the hope of inspiring some discussions in terms of methodology.Following the introduction are five chapters, clarifying Roland Barthes’ideological track in a diachronic way. Chapter One is his re-interpretation of semiotics, text, and the dialectic relation between the two. He elucidated the linguistic features of symbols, and managed to establish a discipline investigating the signification system, which comes beyond the narrow-sense linguistics but falls into the category of broad-sense linguistics. He then formulated a semiotic system on the basis of Saussure’s linguistic system and proposed four groups of relations:langue and parole, signifier and signified, syntagm and system, and denotation and connotation. With the premise that semiotics is the deconstruction of linguistics, he further pointed out that text is a symbol system constituted by syntagmatic and paradigmatic relations, and that language is the carrier of text and text describes the generation of literary meaning. In a reverse deduction, therefore, literature (or culture) research must take text itself as subject, so as to study the "language structure" of text, or the system of symbols. Thereby, the theoretical foundation is laid for constructivist semiotics.Chapter Two mainly concerns Barthes’mythological structure. Mythology is a discourse connoting ideology, and a concealed token of the bourgeois class’s "power discourse". Having discovered the structure, Barthes established a cultural signifying pattern to describe meaning and the generating mechanism of meaning. In this respect, Barthes made a distinction between language system and mythological system, the latter being the sub-branch of the language system in a semiotic sense, also named metalanguage system. In the structure, the signifier on the lingual level is sense, and the one on the mythological level is form, while meaning is the link between the two. This, in general, is the structure of mythology. At the end of the chapter, we try to apply Barthes’ meaning pattern to the analysis of the mythological structure of a piece of news in contemporary discourse.Chapter Three discusses the syntax of narrative texts. Based on previous researches done by Levi-Strauss, Greimas, etc., Barthes constructed a narrative syntax to analyze narrative texts. He briefed the syntax with three formative elements:meaning, function and action. And the narrative system is the interaction of segmentation and integration. He further briefed several relations of the action sequence.Chapter Four focuses on two essential concepts of Barthes’ later structuralism: reading codes and inter-textuality. By analyzing Balzac’s Sarrazin, Barthes proposed the distinction between "texte lisible" and "texte scriptable", and outlined five codes that manipulate a text:hermeneutic code, seme code, symbolic code, proairetic code, and cultural code. Every kind of code is a way of expression,"weaving" the whole network of a text. Meanwhile, texts connect to each other by interrelated quotations. Therefore, the analysis of a text is not to find an ultimate sense, but to find every possible sense, which in turn, eventuates in "Envisage,imagine activate diversification of text and the openness of the meaning-gendering." At the end of the chapter, we try to analyze a contemporary Chinese short story with Barthes’approach discussed here.Chapter Five is a methodological conclusion. After having examined Roland Barthes’structuralist semiotics, we try to probe into the limitations of the structuralist methodology, to identify the bias of the so-called "scientific philosophy" in the realm of literature, to affirm the need for modern literary theory transition, and to propose a "constructivist criticism". By borrowing the distinguishing methods in traditional structuralism, the chapter puts forward a new textual typology and constructs a new modal of criticism.The dissertation thereby concludes:first, the "scientific" and "literary" exploration of Roland Barthes’structuralist semiotics has adapted to the time’s need, and provided a refined analytical structure for literary research with strong practicability; second, similar to other defects of structuralism, it brings forth the problem of logo-centrism to treat text as a self-proving discourse in text analysis and exercise certain dichotomies; third, as a literary theorist that pursues diversity and openness, he didn’t restrain himself on generative syntax, but marched into the field of deconstructionism. His courage of self denying and deconstructing, and constant seeking of developing conceptions of history are worthy of reverence; forth, literary criticism in the new times should work on establishing a new method of criticism, to integrate the "internal" and "external" aspects of literary study and promote the development of critical theory. Barthes’ structuralist semiotics is significant in providing the theories and methodologies. |
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