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2 STRUCTURALISM AND SEMIOTICS KATE MCGOWAN MEANINGS 101: WHAT IS A SPINSTER? Perhaps this is not a very challenging question since a spinster is, quite obviously, simply an unmarried woman. Yet we already seem to know that a spinster is so much more be...

2 STRUCTURALISM AND SEMIOTICS KATE MCGOWAN MEANINGS 101: WHAT IS A SPINSTER? Perhaps this is not a very challenging question since a spinster is, quite obviously, simply an unmarried woman. Yet we already seem to know that a spinster is so much more besides. I’m sure if I asked you to describe a spinster, you would do so easily. A whole stock of images, I’m prepared to bet, would spring readily to mind. Think about it, briey. Is Cameron Diaz a spinster? Why not? She’s an unmarried woman. Why, when you hear or see the word ‘spinster’, do you so readily think of someone who is more like the Queen of England (even though she is, in fact, a married woman) than, say, Naomi Campbell? Why do we seem to share a conceptual notion of a spinster as someone who is boring, conservative, shy and retiring, rather than someone who is enchanting, adventurous and daring? And how do we come to know these meanings even when we don’t, if you’re like me, regularly use the word ‘spinster’ in our vocabulary? One way of answering these questions may lie in the elds of knowledge we call structuralism and semiotics. If you have ever wondered about cultural meanings generally – why some lies are white and bad actions always draw black marks – then you have already begun to consider how the culture you inhabit generates the meanings it does, as well as what might be at stake in those meanings for culture generally. If this is the case, then structuralism and semiotics will interest you because they can help you to pursue those questions with a great deal more rigour than basic common sense. In the course of this chapter, I shall introduce some fundamental principles of these interrelated terms, and try to show exactly what they can offer us as cultural critics of varying kinds. In addition to the two terms them- selves, we shall look at the ways in which each has been taken up in the elds of literary and visual studies, as well as within cultural studies as a whole. Let’s start with structuralism. STRUCTURALISM As an academic discipline, structuralism is primarily concerned with the study of structures – that is, how things get organized into meaningful entities – as well as the structural relationships between things. Its premise is that whatever things mean they will always come to mean by virtue of a set of underlying principles which can be determined by close analysis. 12  ST R UC T UR AL I SM AND SE MIO TICS Structuralism’s understanding of the world, then, is that everything that consti- tutes it – us and the meanings, texts and rituals within which we participate – is not the work of God, or of the mysteries of nature, but rather an effect of the principles that structure us, the meanings we inhabit and so on. The idea is that the world without structures is meaningless – a random and chaotic continuum of possibilities. What structures do is to order that continuum, to organize it according to a certain set of principles, which enable us to make sense of it. In this way, structures make the world tangible to us, conceptually real, and hence meaningful. Once discovered, so the theory goes, structures show us how meanings come about, why things seem to be just the way they are and, by implication, what might lead us to contest them. One of the central principles of the structuralist project, at least through the twen- tieth century, arises from the work of a Swiss linguist by the name of Ferdinand de Saussure. In a series of lectures given at the University of Geneva between 1907 and 1911 Saussure argued that language provides a foundational structure for the world around us by organizing it into tangible entities that we can, as an effect of that language, then describe and discuss. Without language, Saussure argued: thought is a vague, uncharted nebula. There are no pre-existing ideas, and nothing is distinct before the appearance of language. Against this oating realm of thought, would sounds by themselves yield prede- limited entities? No more so than ideas…. The characteristic role of language with respect to thought is not to create a material phonic means for expressing ideas but to serve as a link between thought and sound, under conditions that of necessity bring about the reciprocal delimitations of units…language works out its units while taking shape between two shapeless masses. (Saussure 1974: 112) So nothing is distinct before the appearance of language. While as humans we have the capacity for generating thought and sound, it is not until we enter language that we are able to organize that capacity and to make the necessary cultural associa- tions between thought and sound. Although this account of language may seem mildly tame to us now, it nonetheless provided a highly signicant assertion about language, the implications of which were to revolutionize the way we think about how we think. Prior to Saussure, language had been thought of simply as a system for naming an objective reality which was presumed to exist before, and outside of, language itself. Within this way of thinking, the real world is clearly already there, while language simply comes along to label it in all its specicities. If we return for a moment to the example with which this chapter began, we might be able to observe the workings of this assumption about language more closely. In the pre-Saussurean understanding of language, then, unmarried women would be understood simply as a natural and inev- itable phenomenon of human life, and therefore readily intelligible as such. The function of language in this understanding would simply be to provide the vocab- ulary – the word ‘spinster’ – in order to label that existence. Language, in other 13  KAT E Mc GOWAN words, would play no role in the formation of the entity, or the idea, of ‘spinster’ as we know it. But, stated like this, the process already seems questionable. In order for the idea ‘spinster’ to become meaningful in language, the concept of ‘women’, as the other of ‘men’ in the duality ‘women and men’, would have to come rst. The idea ‘spinster’ could not, in other words, exist without a corresponding idea of gender as male and female. But any meaning for ‘spinster’ is of course also dependent on the prior establishment of the concept of marriage, as well as a differ- ential understanding of the status of ‘women’ and ‘men’ in relation to marriage. Indeed, in this example, meaning begins to seem to have a great deal more to do with value, and specically cultural value, than the model of language as a naming system might suggest. The meaning of spinster is, after all, surely not inevitable, natural or true, but rather the product of a system of cultural values which are open to debate. If this is the case, then, far from simply naming an objective reality, language would seem to play an important role in realizing reality, as well as its meaning for us within the linguistic communities we inhabit. If we did not have the linguistic term ‘spinster’, would we think of female existence in the ways that we do? It is certainly relatively easy to imagine a social community in which the concept of a spinster might have no meaning whatsoever – not necessarily because unmarried women do not exist, but rather because women are not only valued, or thought of as meaningful, in relation to whether or not they are married to men. While this example is not too difcult to follow – it does not really challenge our assumptions about the world at this time in history – it does nonetheless illustrate a principle which can be disturbing to the way we see things generally. What if, for example, we lived in a linguistic community which did not differentiate between ‘women’ and ‘men’ in the ways that we do so readily, and apparently so naturally? What if the language we spoke did not have gender as such? Would we still be able to think it? Say there were three terms for gender, or six, or twelve. Imagine what that would do to the ways in which we think about human existence and take for granted the apparent naturalness by which we experience it. Of course, there are cultures other than English-speaking ones within which gender is more than the two terms ‘woman’ and ‘man’. Hindi, for example, has the term ‘hijra’, meaning something it is difcult, in English, to comprehend fully since it is not translatable as either man or woman, nor as something neutral or in between. Gender as three categories literally shifts what is, or at least can be, thought of as gender as we in English believe we know it. If you speak more than one language, you will already be familiar with the impossibilities of translating conceptually from one language to another, and so have plenty of examples of this yourself. While the problems of translation can be interesting and amusing, however, they also have wide-ranging implications. In the examples I have given it should be apparent that different cultures, that is different linguistic groups, think about the world in different ways. One way of responding to this observation, and the history of imperialism attests to this, would be to conclude that some cultures think about the world in better ways than others, or with a greater degree of sophistication and authenticity. Another way might be to think more carefully about, and with more 14  ST R UC T UR AL I SM AND SE MIO TICS attention to, just exactly how these meanings come about. In order to do this, we would have to start again with our thinking, this time with a different model of what language is and what it does. And that is where Saussure is useful to us. As I have already suggested, for Saussure language is not simply a system for naming a reality which pre-exists it. Turning that notion on its head, Saussure argued instead that language is in fact a primary structure – one that orders, and therefore is responsible for, everything that follows. If this is so, then it seems fairly straight- forward that different languages will divide, shape and organize the phenomenal world in different ways. While this understanding of language allows us to see cultures other than ‘our’ own as relatively different, by implication it must also show us that the culture we claim as ‘ours’ is in turn neither natural nor inevitable. That is, it demands that we recognize as structurally produced the culture which seems to us most obvious, most natural and most true. What Saussure’s work gave to structuralism, then, was an account of language as a primary structure, a system of signs whose meanings are not obvious, but rather produced as an effect of the logic internal to the structural system that language is. In addition, perhaps Saussure’s most radical claim was that within that structure meaning is generated through the logic of difference. He writes, for example, that Everything that has been said up to this point boils down to this: in language there are only differences. Even more important: a difference generally implies positive terms between which the difference is set up; but in language there are only differences without positive terms. (Saussure 1974: 120) In this model, it is language which enables the world to be constituted to us as intel- ligible. The exact constitution of that intelligibility will depend on the language we speak and, as a result, will be different depending on the language we speak. It might be important at this stage to point out that this does not presume a disappearance of reality as such. The real world is still understood to exist in these terms. However, it does insist that we can only come to know the real within the terms which language provides for us, in which case it might be said that rather than using language to describe the real as we nd it, language structures that real so that we are able to nd it in the rst place. The implications of this are huge, and I shall come back to them in detail when we get to semiotics. For the purposes of our discussion of structuralism, however, it is enough at this point to say that the signicance of Saussure’s theory is threefold: (i) it gives us the notion that language is not natural but systematic; (ii) that language is the primary system of cultural existence and that it works to structure what we think we know; and (iii) it shifts the emphasis of cultural study rmly in the direction of attention to texts and the evidence they can be said to provide of the linguistic construction of meaning. One result of this shift has been the development of the importance of structuralist textual analysis within the elds of literary, anthropological, visual and popular 15  KAT E Mc GOWAN cultural study. This is important, since it moves critical attention away from concern with the author, together with themes, characters and plots in texts, and begins to focus instead on the structural principles by which texts themselves are able to operate meaningfully. In 1928, a Russian critic by the name of Vladimir Propp undertook what is generally considered the rst structuralist analysis of literary texts. Drawing on the work of Saussure on language, Propp analysed 100 Russian folktales and showed that a single set of structural principles was at work in them all. Just as sentences in everyday language are determined by the internal rules of language as a system – grammar, syntax and so on – so Propp proposed that stories can be seen as the result of an analogous grammar of storytelling. In order to tell a story, narrative structures must be in place to shape language into story form. If this is the case, then the meanings which arise from the narrativization of language can be seen to depend to a very large extent on the structures of narrative form, in which case form itself is far from incidental to the creation of meaning. One result of Propp’s work, then, was to establish the intrinsic structural relation of form in literary work to its content. Concerned as it was with the identication of deep structures of narrative, Propp’s work does not really pay very much attention to meaning in the cultural sense that we are more familiar with now. It remained, in these terms, rather formalistic. However, it did provide us with an important basis from which to begin to discuss the ways in which what texts mean can be derived from an initial analysis of how they mean. Interestingly, this concern with the ways in which structures can be said to give rise to meaning was by no means limited in its early manifestations to the analysis of written texts, as the work of the structural anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss can be used to demonstrate. Borrowing specically from Saussure’s work on language, Lévi-Strauss was able to show that structural analysis is as relevant to the study of what he identied as the ‘customs, institutions and accepted patterns of behaviour’ of specically cultural groups as it is to the written texts those groups may produce. Indeed, in his foundational work Structural Anthropology, he argued that by isolating and analysing the structures through which social communities constitute them- selves, anthropology could: be in a position to understand basic similarities between forms of social life, such as language, art, law and religion, that on the surface seem to differ greatly. At the same time, we shall have the hope of overcoming the opposition between the collective nature of culture and its manifestations in the individual, since the so-called ‘collective consciousness’ would, in the nal analysis, be no more than an expression, on the level of individual thought and behaviour, of certain time and space modalities of the universal laws which make up the unconscious activity of the mind. (Lévi-Strauss 1963: 65) The question of the structural meanings of more conventionally understood texts was taken up again in Europe in the 1960s by a number of cultural critics at work in elds such as art, lm and literary studies. A broader discussion of these works can be 16  ST R UC T UR AL I SM AND SE MIO TICS found in Chapter 3 of this book, which focuses more specically on narrative. However, in order to illustrate the signicance of structuralist method to analyses of cultural meaning within these academic elds, it is worth briey summarizing two of them here. Writing in 1957, in a work entitled Mythologies, the French cultural critic Roland Barthes stated that ‘a little formalism turns one away from History, but…a lot brings one back’ (Barthes 1993: 112). What this implies is that if structuralist analysis of narrative is to be useful to the critic of culture and its meanings, then it must start but not end with a detailed reading of the formal properties that make meanings possible. Barthes gave an example of this in his own rather painstaking analysis of a nineteenth- century short story by the French writer Honoré de Balzac, entitled ‘Sarrasine’. Here, Barthes identies ve codes of narrative structure which enable the story to work as such. However, what those codes are is less important to Barthes’ analysis than the fact that they seem to play a double role in producing cultural meaning for the text. While the codes enable the story to be told – without them its telling would not be possible – they also seem to mark its limits. In Barthes’ account, the story of ‘Sarrasine’ revolves around the gure of a castrato whose gendered identity the structures of the story itself cannot contain. The central gure of Sarrasine (the name implies the femi- nization of a masculine referent) remains ambiguous throughout. It cannot be male and it cannot be female, though the structural principles of narrative try to make it each in turn in order to make it intelligible. In this case, a structural analysis of story- telling is seen not simply to conrm the structures of meaning to which narrative gives rise, but rather to challenge them. Ironically, it is a structural analysis of the form of the story that makes possible a certain kind of escape from the connes of the struc- tures upon which that story itself has to be built. By starting with the structural prin- ciples of textual form, Barthes is able to show what he calls the ‘footprints marking the escape of the text; for if the text is subject to some form, this form is not unitary’ (Barthes 1990b: 20). This gesture of identifying the structures of a text in order to show the impossi- bility of the terms upon which it attempts to make its meaning is important because it opens up a discussion of the relationship of narrative to cultural value. It also fosters the possibility of resisting the apparently obvious meanings of cultural texts which it might otherwise be tempting to understand as simply conrming the status quo of cultural convention. Drawing on the work of Barthes, the French literary critic Pierre Macherey went on to apply the principles discerned by him to a concerted theory of literary production as well as reading practice. For Macherey, the structural properties of literary works are interesting in as much as they can be seen to fail to contain the multiplicity of cultural meanings upon which they are necessarily built. In the light of this, Macherey advocated a reading practice which would focus not on the coherence of the text, but rather on its contradictions, its strangenesses and inconsistencies: ‘it can be shown that it is a juxtaposition and conict of several meanings which produces the radical otherness which shapes the work: this conict is not resolved or absorbed, but simply displayed’ (Macherey 1978: 84). 17  KAT E Mc GOWAN He argued that if the work of the literary critic was ever to be more than parasitic on the literary text – simply reprising its meaning as though it were determined once and for all by the sense of the text – then it must be read ‘symptomatically’ for instances of non-sense. In other words, he urged that we attend to the structural laws of the text only in order to show the instances in which they are broken – the symptoms, that is, of the text’s own resistance to those laws. Again, the argument advanced by Macherey is most compelling in its full complexity. However, for the purposes of illustrating its importance to structuralism, I shall explore just one aspect of it here with an example of my own. In Deuteronomy, Chapter 22, verse 5, it is written that ‘The woman shall not wear that which pertaineth unto a man, neither shall a man put on a woman’s garment: for all that do so are an abomination unto the Lord thy God’. Now the obvious reading of this fragment of text would be something like: it is wrong for women and men to dress the same. But to read it in this way would simply be to reprise the text, to rein- force its obvious meaning by putting it into other words which are simply substi- tutable for the original without attending to its cultural implications. Those implications, however, are ambiguous if we follow Macherey’s line of analysis. By isolating just a few oddities of the linguistic construction of the verse, it is possible to produce an entirely different reading. Take the term ‘shall not’. This implies, in a kind of legalistic way, that something is strictly forbidden. It is a bit odd, it seems to me, that God (via Moses) feels so strongly about clothes as to issue an edict demanding that women and men observe strict codes of dress that ‘pertain’ only unto them. Is gender so precarious that women wearing clothes which ‘pertaineth unto’ men (and, of course, vice versa) threatens its undoing? If so, what is gender? Does it really boil down to ‘garments’, and, if it does, is that not social rather than natural? ‘Abomination’ seems to suggest a huge transgression and one has to wonder what is at stake here. What, symptomatically, is this text so afraid of and why? Also, what on earth were people up to that meant God was forced to issue a statement forbidding them to wear each other’s clothes? Perhaps, rather than being simply a testament to the word of God, this verse can be made to show that the word of God is, in this instance, symptomatic of a failure of meanings to stay where they are put. Of course, playing with meanings, showing the terms upon which they are constructed in order to show the ways in which they may also be contested, places a very different emphasis on the function and effect of the sign itself. Indeed, we seem to be moving from general principles towards the specicities of the individual signs which work within those principles to make cultural meanings possible. In order to address this issue, it is useful now to turn our attention more clearly to what the ‘semiotics’ part of this chapter’s title may imply. SEMIOTICS Semiotics is concerned with signs. As an academic discipline, semiotics is primarily concerned with the life of signs – from their production as an effect of signifying systems, right through to the particular implications of the signications they can be 18  ST R UC T UR AL I SM AND SE MIO TICS said to carry within the cultural systems in which they operate. If language works, in Saussurean terms, to structure the real as we know it, then the signs of which any language is composed may be said to constitute the minutiae of that real in all its specicities. If this is the case, then signs deserve special attention when it comes to any kind of analysis of cultural texts. One advantage of thinking of signs as systematic – that is, as an effect of signi- fying systems – is to open up the possibilities of thinking about systems as more than just language as we understand it commonsensically to simply mean speech. If you have ever looked critically at an advertisement, you will already be aware of systems of signication which are not wholly verbal. Indeed, there are whole regimes of signifying systems that are primarily visual. Art, for example, is one such system of signication, as are lm and advertising, all forms of writing, and sign language, which itself clearly signies without recourse to any form of sound. What connects these different systems of signication, however, is their function as systems of signs and, for Saussure, this makes each of them comparable to language as he has described it. Indeed, for semiotics, the sign system of language is still primary and continues to provide the fundamental basis from which meaning can be said to arise. Where sign systems are acknowledged as visual, gestural or marks on a page, they are understood to work like language in that they are analogously effective only when understood as part of an underlying system of logic. In each case, it is still the structural rules and regulations of the system from which they arise that make visual, gestural and written signs intelligible as such. Let us take lm as one particular example. What is lm? Well, technically, it is a series of marks made by the play of light on a photosensitive surface. But it is also a particular combination of those individual marks into sequences which can then be projected at speed to produce an apparently continuous stream of images. In turn, these images themselves can be understood to provide a particular set of suggested meanings. Take, for example, a single image of a deserted and dusty outcrop of rocks. If I cut that image between an image of a mother and child and one of an unshaven man with a rie, my single image comes to signify something like danger. On its own, that single image has the capacity to signify a whole range of things – it could mean peace or desolation – but that range is limited by its place in a system of signication we can call the shot sequences of lm. The meaning of the single shot, then – the deserted and dusty outcrop of rocks – is not intrinsic either to the shot itself or, rather more remarkably, to the rocks themselves, but is rather determined by the association of the shot with what comes before and after it in the sequence. And it is in this sense that the signifying system which is lm can be said to operate just like language. No language I know operates without the presumption of relationships between the elements which compose it. Verbal language may well be composed of individual words, but these words in themselves are not entirely meaningful until they are asso- ciated with other words in a highly structured sequence. If I were to write the words ‘horse’, ‘pigs’ and ‘busted’, for example, I would be writing words which have meaning within the English language, but I would not be making sense since English presumes a set of structural laws for the combination of words in order for meaning 19  KAT E Mc GOWAN to be generated. Of course, even the words themselves are ambiguous since their meaning can vary in English usage – ‘horse’ can mean a four-legged equestrian animal, but is also potentially food (at least in France), and in slang terms, so I’m told, heroin. Each of these potential meanings would seem to have nothing neces- sarily to do with the marks h-o-r-s-e as I construct them on the page, but rather a whole lot to do with the cultural associations drawn between those marks (in this case the written sign ‘horse’) and a conceptual notion. Both the marks and the conceptual notion, then, are an effect of the cultural value of a sign as it operates socially. However, as can be seen from the example of ‘horse’, even that cultural value is not entirely xed. Indeed, the meaning of the sign ‘horse’ is implicitly not present in the sign itself. ‘Horse’, as a sign, depends to a large extent for its meaning not on what it is (since that is overdetermined) but rather on its relative position within a sequence of signs that we can say, in language, roughly equates to a sentence. I could, after all, write ‘I love horse’ and so narrow its potential for meaning to food or heroin. I could write ‘I love horse, but hate pigs’, but that might remain equally, if differently, ambiguous. It could mean that I love eating horse but don’t like bacon sandwiches, in which case the meaning of ‘horse’ is temporarily delayed onto, and determined by, the pigs which follow. But, it does not end there since ‘pigs’, in the colloquial use of British English, can also mean ‘police’, in which case the individual sign ‘horse’ could still mean heroin. The best I can say is that I have ruled out the four-legged equestrian animal. If I wrote ‘I love horse, but hate pigs. Last week I got busted’, then my sentence structure could narrow the meaning of ‘horse’ a little further to mean, most obviously, heroin. That meaning, however, is still far from xed, since it would always be vulnerable to a shift in meaning by whatever I might write next. I could go on. It may be sufcient, however, to draw the following three conclu- sions from this example: (i) signs function to constitute meaning only within the terms of the system of which they are a part; (ii) while all sign systems function according to their own structural principles, they all function nonetheless like language; (iii) all forms of cultural text can therefore be understood as signifying systems, the meanings of which are not xed for all time but, rather, are open to change. Film is, as I have suggested, one such example. When understood in the terms of systems of signication as I have just described them, lm becomes meaningful as cultural text precisely because of the terms of the system which constitutes it as such. Any story lm tells, any meanings it provides, will not be natural in its obvi- ousness, but rather the effect of the signication of a whole series of signs and their relative positions within the rules of combination for the system which is lm. Films in this sense do not simply reect a pre-ordained reality, but rather work extremely hard to manufacture one. If this is the case, then lms become important sites not only for the constitution of cultural meanings, but also for the contestation of cultural values. Of course, this is not simply the province of lm, but might just as easily apply to any system of signs participating in the constitution of cultural meaning and value in any society and at any given moment in time. As such, as well as lm this would include the visual regimes of advertising as easily as literary text. 20  ST R UC T UR AL I SM AND SE MIO TICS Just as structuralism could be said to have changed the ways in which we engage with texts like literature or the bible, so semiotics (hand in hand with structuralism) can be said to have changed the ways in which we are able to engage with the specicities of meanings comprising texts. Again, it can change what it means to read, as well as the practice of reading itself. This obviously has implications for cultural study in that it implies all forms of cultural text are equally rich in meaning and, potentially, sites at which meaning can be contested. In this sense, a pop video is as replete with signi- cance as, say, a poem by John Donne. And presumably each can be analysed critically just as easily as the other. All that separates them, if anything does, is a notion of value. This should not necessarily mean, however, that the only implication of structur- alism and semiotics as forms of cultural analysis would be to do away with the study of literature in favour of more populist forms of signication. Indeed, there is an important argument to be made for retaining the study of literature alongside more populist forms in order to show that the meanings it produces are as entirely cultural as anything else. There might even be an argument for suggesting that it is even more important to apply the reading practice to which semiotics gives rise to literature than to any other kind of text. That would of course lead us to a whole new reading practice in relation to literature, but that might be no bad thing. Indeed, to read literature as a system of signs would be to open literary texts them- selves to a process of decoding capable of revealing not just its structures and forms but also the ideological implications of the very syntax and grammar from which it is composed. As an act of cultural critique, this seems to me to be well worth exploring. FURTHER READING Barthes, Roland (1990) S/Z, trans. Richard Miller, Oxford: Blackwell. This book is, as its preface states, the trace of work done during a two-year seminar (1968–69) at the École Pratique des Hautes Études. While it provides some interesting principles of structuralist analysis, it is nonetheless an extremely close reading of Balzac’s short story line by line. It is, perhaps, the implications of Barthes’ painstaking reading which remain of interest to students today. Barthes, Roland (1993) Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers, London: Vintage. This is a highly readable and engaging text which outlines Barthes’ theory of the structure of ‘myth’ as well as offering a series of short essays on aspects of French bourgeois culture as examples of how the theory may be used to engage with the everyday. These essays range from readings of advertisements for soap powder, through wrestling matches, to an exhibition of photographs entitled ‘The Great Family of Man’. Lévi-Strauss, Claude (1963) Structural Anthropology, trans. Claire Jacobson and Brooker Grundfast Schoepf, New York: Basic Books. This is now a classic structuralist text and shows the ways in which structural analysis informed a great deal of our understandings of culture. Macherey, Pierre (1978) A Theory of Literary Production, trans. Geoffrey Wall, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. For anyone interested in reading against the grain of conventional meanings, Pierre Macherey’s account of the process of production of literary texts is an important starting-point. 21  KAT E Mc GOWAN Propp, Vladimir (1958) Morphology of the Folktale, trans. Laurence Scott, Austin, TX and London: University of Texas Press. This study asserts that the fairytale is an important prototype for all narrative structures. It also examines the ways in which the narrative patterns of fairytales work to establish ‘norms’ through which their content is, subsequently, stated as obvious. Propp’s point was to de-familiarize the ‘obviousness’ of the content of the tales he studied, and to locate it instead in the realms of cultural value. Saussure, Ferdinand de (1974) Course in General Linguistics, trans. Wade Baskin, London: Fontana. This is an interesting publication since it is derived from the transcription of notes made by students who attended Saussure’s lectures on linguistics at the University of Geneva between 1907 and 1911. It is a key text in structural linguistics and remained central to the tradition of poststructuralist thinking in Europe through the twentieth century. It is, of course, primarily concerned with aspects of linguistics as a quasi-scientic study and can be rather dry if read in its entirety if this is not your main interest. However, key passages from it have been widely anthologized. 22