Publisher's Synopsis
Introducing Structuralism The rapidity with which major movements suddenly appear, flourish, lose their momentum, become senescent, and eventually vanish marks the history of the twentiethcentury continental philosophy. Structuralism is primarily known to be a French phenomenon that emerged from within the debates of French epistemology during the 1950s and in keeping with philosophical movements such as phenomenology and existentialism loomed large over the Continental intellectual thoughts of the mid-1960s and the Anglo-American academy of the 1970s. This phenomenon was closely linked to the rise of the social sciences and critique of traditional humanities, philology and philosophy in particular. In its most crucial sense Structuralism is not a philosophy as such rather a method or mode of thinking and analysis applicable to a wide diversity of disciplines, from linguistics, psychology, and anthropology to literature, psychoanalysis, and political economy. The group of thinkers located under the rubric "structuralist," is representative of an unprecedented diversity; the psychologist Jean Piaget (1896-980), the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908-2009), the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan (1901-1981), the Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser (1918-1990), and the literary critic and semiotician Roland Barthes (1915-1980) to name a few. However, they do not form a coherent group, but do share certain commonalities that characterize the structuralist project as a whole: the priority of 'general structure' over agency. Structuralism primarily treated as a method of analysis, cannot be accepted within a single bottom line proposition, but can be understood by its conviction that things cannot be understood in isolation, and are required to be observed within the context of those larger structures they form a part of - hence the term "structuralism‟. Within such disciplines as sociology, anthropology, and linguistics, structuralism claims that human culture must be comprehended by their relationships to a large overhanging system or structure. It seeks to manifest or uncover those underlying structures that influence the.
