One of the most important and wide-reaching intellectual movements of the twentieth century. It is often referred to as a ‘linguistic turn’ because the origin of the method is the insight, derived from the work of Swiss linguist Saussure, Ferdinand de, that virtually all human creations can be understood as though they were structured like language. Indeed, French psychoanalyst Lacan, Jacques went so far as to pronounce that the unconscious is structured like a language. The crucial implication of Lacan’s claim, often missed, is that what this means is that the unconscious is a system, just as language is a system, and that they are both structured in the same way. For the same reason, it is also described as an anti-humanist method because it neither prioritizes nor privileges the human subject or individual conscious. Interestingly, in Cours de linguistique générale (1916), translated as Course in General Linguistics (1959), to which the origins of structuralism are generally traced, Saussure never used the word ‘structure’, his preference was for the term ‘system’, which was in fact the more apt choice. What Saussure set out to discover was the universal system of language itself, that which is common to all languages. He wanted to know how language means, not what its meanings are. To do this, he had to change the way linguistics looked at language. Saussure made three crucial moves, which taken together add up to the basic methodological matrix of structuralism. First, he shifted attention from the temporal to the spatial dimension of language. Until then, linguistics (still a branch of philology and not yet the science it has since become) focused on the history or evolution of specific languages, charting changes in pronunciation, spelling, vocabulary, grammar, and so on across time. Saussure referred to this trajectory of analysis as the diachronic axis and while he conceded its importance he argued that it left unanswered the question of what language is. He focused instead on what he called the synchronic axis, which is language as it is right now, and his way in was to think about the intriguing problem of why different languages have different words for the same thing, or similar words with different meanings. The second move, namely his conclusion to the foregoing problem, which after several decades of delay revolutionized the human sciences, was that the relation between a particular sound and its meaning is arbitrary. Saussure had thus to make a further distinction between the concrete fact of a language as it is spoken in the present (which he referred to as parole) and the underlying system of combination enabling language to function as a mode of communication (which he referred to as langue). Langue and parole are inseparable, but while parole must, of necessity, have a concrete presence, langue does not. Parole is an imperfect and partial realization or instantiation of langue and Saussure’s genius was to use it to triangulate what the ‘whole’ system must look like. Langue as Saussure understood it is a social fact, that is to say a greater conceptual entity than a single individual can grasp, regardless of how many languages they may have mastered. Finally, Saussure proposed that linguistics should change the object of its analysis from words to what he called sign. Signs, which are the concrete instantiations of parole, whose meaningfulness is made possible by langue, are composed of two elements, a signifier (signifiant) and a signified (signifié). The former is the sound of a particular word, which must be both distinguishable from other sounds and reproducible (it is these twin attributes that separate phonetics from sheer noise). The latter is the concept we generally associate with that sound. The relationship is not that of a word and a thing (referent), which would reduce language to a naming system. The sign is not self-sufficient, as a symbol is, but relies on a system of inter-relating differences for its meaning. Structuralism became a global intellectual movement when its methodology was adopted by other disciplines and adapted to suit their own specific objectives and problematics. The first discipline to do so was anthropology, led by Lévi-Strauss, Claude, who was introduced to Saussure’s work by Jakobson, Roman in New York, where they were both exiled during World War II (the two co-published a number of short explorations of what a structuralist method might look like outside of linguistics). In philosophy, it was Merleau-Ponty, Maurice who took the initiative, while in literary studies it was Barthes, Roland who paved the way forward, and film studies (Metz, Christian), psychoanalysis (Lacan, Jacques), and Marxism (Althusser, Louis) followed suit. The advantage of structuralism over other methods was, as later critics came to realize, also its inherent disadvantage. Nevertheless, its advantages are considerable, as can be seen in popular fiction studies, where its power of comparative analysis continues to be useful. Eco, Umberto’s analysis of James Bond novels and films in The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts (1979) is exemplary in this respect. Eco reads the entire Bond catalogue and extracts a series of features in common to them all at the level of the organization of the narrative. In this way, he is able to show how the Bond ‘machine’ functions to create stories that are consistent, similar in their essentials, yet different enough to satisfy readers, and thus open a window into the unconscious of author and reader. A similar approach has been used by Janice Radway in her analysis of popular romances, Reading the Romance (1991) and Will Wright in his study of westerns, Sixguns and Society (1992). The most sophisticated analysis of this type is undoubtedly James, C. L. R.’s semiotic square. The disadvantages of structuralism are twofold: first, as Marxist critics like Jameson, Fredric have pointed out, structuralism is ahistorical (deliberately so, since it was the refusal of the diachronic that enabled the focus on the synchronic), which is a problem because although it is able to identify the various models and machines operative in culture, it cannot explain how they were created, nor why they persist; second, as Derrida, Jacques has pointed out, the signified does not supply the signifier with a meaning because it itself is undecided. Almost any example will prove this point---if the concept of redness is the signified of the signifier ‘red’, then what gives ‘redness’ its meaning? Derrida thus argues the whole system is based on an illusion of ‘presence’, that is the presence of a definitive meaning. Derrida is generally credited with bringing the structuralist era to a close at a conference in Baltimore which, ironically enough, was intended to showcase structuralism to American scholars. Further Reading: F. Jameson The Prison-House of Language: A Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian Formalism (1972). J. Sturrock Structuralism (1986).