Structuralism Texts

Homer was so inspired when he saw Brad Pitt in Troy that he decided to write this 24-book epic poem about it in 700 BCE. He took some blockbuster-making themes like war, wrath, lust, and fate,...

Ever hear of the guy who solves the riddle of the sphinx, accidentally kills his dad, marries his mom, and eventually finds out what he's done and blinds himself? This myth was immortalized in Soph...

We've already had a sneak peak at those lusty nuns and abbots in The Decameron, Boccaccio's 14th century book made up of 100 mini-stories. It's an Italian medieval classic and structuralists think...

Cinderella. Snow White. Little Red Riding Hood. Everyone's familiar with those fairy tales, thanks to the brothers Grimm (and their distant cousin Walt Disney). Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm spent years...

This tearjerker is the heartbreaking story of an escaped slave, Sethe, who chooses to kill her children rather than see them captured and sent back into slavery. Years later, the Civil War is over...

If you want to go straight to the seed from which structuralism began to sprout, then look no further than Saussure's Course in General Linguistics, the book that blossomed into the theory to end a...

Propp's application of structuralist methods to the study of Russian folktales is one of the first instances in which a theorist used structuralism to analyze narrative. If you read the book, chanc...

This book is the bible of structural anthropology. Claude Lévi-Strauss talks about kinship, about mythology, about the links between the study of language and the study of culture, about Amazonian...

Barthes gives a very good introduction to structural literary theory. He outlines the links between linguistics and literary analysis, showing how a critic approaches a literary text in much the sa...