It all began with a linguistics professor who gave a series of lectures on language at the University of Geneva between 1906 and 1911. He had a very bushy mustache, studied more dead languages than...

So, remember Ferdinand de Saussure? That's right, the mustache guy. Well, he knew even more about language than about grooming that luscious facial hair. Saussure's big idea was that language is a...

The early structuralists were set on transforming the study of cultural phenomena into a science. They wanted to take things like language, culture, literature, and the arts and run all sorts of ex...

Between the mid-1960s and the late 1970s, structuralism was the hip theoretical model. But today it's considered to be as old-fashioned as the bellbottoms and flower headbands the groovier structur...

What is literature? Literature is a collection of narratives that seem to be dissimilar on the surface but are actually governed by underlying rules and structures which they all share, despite the...