In the past week I’ve been slowly reading through the first two parts of the literary theory, the brand new subject which I was totally unfamiliar with before. By going through the whole contents listed in front of the book, i was wondering why the author make such arrangement of all the theories, is there any connections in those seemingly separated scholars?

Bearing this question in mind, i began to plunge into the extensive ocean of literary theories. Now i know that Structualism derives historically and logically from the Formalism. Overall, i have an impression that both Formalism and Structuralism are trying to explain, to define, and to separate Literature from other scientific subjects in a scientific method, by analysing specific literary characteristics. While Russian Formalists focus on the description of literary language, its techniques of operation, and defamiliarization, Roman Jakobson, who is one of the original critical figures of Formalists, contribute a lot to the task of adducing the internal system or order of linguistic, cultural, and literary phenomena.

To understand the Structuralism, one cannot miss the theory of language by Saussure, who inspires the anthropology, literary and cultural studies, psychoanalysis, intellectuel history and Marxist theory. In order to differantiate language from speech, the conceptions of Sign, Signified, and Signifier were raised and two major principals ( ” the Arbitrary nature of the sign ” and ” the Linear nature of the signifier ” ) were put forward. So can we understand better the Mythologies of Roland Barthes.

So from these conceptions and theories, i think that all those theories have some connections more or less and that literary theories can be perceived as a whole continuous system although its gigantic range of aspects.