Gérard Genette

"Structuralism and literary criticism"

K. M. Newton

pp. 89-93

in: K. M. Newton (ed), Twentieth-century literary theory, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 1997

Abstract

In a new chapter of La Pensée sauvage, Claude Lévi-Strauss defines mythical thought as "a kind of intellectual bricolage)¹ The nature of bricolage is to make use of materials and tools that, unlike those of the engineer, for example, were not intended for the task in hand. … But there is another intellectual activity, peculiar to more "developed" cultures, to which this analysis might be applied almost word for word: I mean criticism, more particularly literary criticism, which distinguishes itself formally from other kinds of criticism by the fact that it uses the same materials — writing — as the works with which it is concerned; art criticism or musical criticism are obviously not expressed in sound or in color, but literary criticism speaks the same language as its object: it is a metalanguage, "discourse upon a discourse".² It can therefore be a metaliterature, that is to say, "a literature of which literature itself is the imposed object".³…

Cited authors

Lévi-Strauss Claude