As Barthes' work with structuralism began to flourish around the time of his debates with Picard, his investigation of structure focused on revealing the importance of language in writing, which he felt was overlooked by old criticism. Barthes' *"Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives"* is concerned with examining the correspondence between the structure of a sentence and that of a larger narrative, thus allowing the narrative to be viewed along linguistic lines. *Barthes split this work into three hierarchical levels: ‘functions’, ‘actions’, and ‘narrative’.* ‘Functions’ are elementary pieces of work, such as a single descriptive word that can be used to identify a character. That character would be an ‘action’, and consequently one of the elements that make up the narrative. Barthes was able to use these distinctions to evaluate how certain key ‘functions work in forming characters. *For example, keywords like ‘dark’, ‘mysterious’, and ‘odd’, when integrated together, formulate a specific kind of character or ‘action’.* By breaking down the work into such fundamental distinctions Barthes was able to judge the degree of realism given functions have in forming their actions and consequently with what authenticity a narrative can be said to reflect on reality. Thus, his structuralist theorizing became another exercise in his ongoing attempts to dissect and expose the misleading mechanisms of bourgeois culture.
*While Barthes found structuralism to be a useful tool and believed that the discourse of literature could be formalized, he did not believe it could become a strictly scientific endeavor.* In the late 1960s, radical movements were taking place in literary criticism. *The poststructuralist movement and the deconstructionism of Jacques Derrida were testing the bounds of the structuralist theory that Barthes' work exemplified.* Derrida identified the flaw of structuralism as its reliance on a transcendental signifier; a symbol of constant, the universal meaning would be essential as an orienting point in such a closed-off system. This is to say that without some regular standard of measurement, a system of criticism that references nothing outside of the actual work itself could never prove useful. But since there are no symbols of constant and universal significance, the entire premise of structuralism as a means of evaluating writing (or anything) is hollow.
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