According to structuralism, meaning or significance is not a kind of core or essence inside things, rather meaning is always outside. Meanings are always attributed to the things by human mind, not contained within them. For example, when we read Donne’s poem The Good Morrow, we should know, according to the structuralists, the genre (Alba) of that particular poem. And the genre can hardly be understood without some notion of the concept of courtly love and we have also to gather knowledge about the other love poetries at Donne’s time. So, it is clear that structuralist approach is actually taking us further and further away from the text, and into large and comparatively abstract questions of genre, history, and philosophy, rather than closer and closer to it, as the Anglo-American tradition demands.

Though structuralism proper began, as we said, in the 1950s and 1960s, it has its roots in the thinking of the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913). His concept can be as three pronouncements in particular:

Firstly, the meanings we give to words are completely arbitrary. Meanings are maintained by convention only.

Secondly, the meanings of words are relational. That is to say, no word can be defined in isolation from other words. The definition of any given word depends upon its relation with other ‘adjoining’ words.

Saussure used a famous example to explain what he meant by saying that there are no intrinsic fixed meanings in language – the example of the 8.25 Geneva to Paris express train. He questioned what is it that gives this train its identity? It isn’t anything material, since each day it will have a different engine and carriages, different drivers and passengers, and so on. If it is late, it won’t even leave at 8.25. Does it even have to be a train? I once asked at Southampton station for the Brighton train, and the ticket collector pointed to a bus standing outside the station and said, ‘That’s it’. It was a Sunday, and because of engineering works on the line a bus service was being used to ferry passengers beyond the sections being worked upon. Sometimes, then, a ‘train’ doesn’t have to be a train. Saussure’s conclusion is that the only thing which gives this train its identity is its position in a structure of differences: it comes between the 7.25 and the 9.25, that is, its identity is purely relational.