Theories, Signs, Structures and Anti-Centricity: From Structuralism to Feminism

Abstract

Structuralism, rose as a movement in the second half of the 20^th century, in France, with the writings of Roland Barthes and French anthropologist Claude Levi - Strauss. The movement is inspired from the writings of the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913) where he holds his theory that language is a self- contained system of signs. The structuralists suggest that the language not only should concern to speech and writing but to signs and signification. In literature, the word ‘structure ‘is used in its specialized sense. It is a system as a whole where the arranged elements will modify the structure but not the structure.