ABSTRACT
Structuralism is a way of approaching texts and practices that is derived from the theoretical work of the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. Post-structuralists reject the idea of an underlying structure upon which meaning can rest secure and guaranteed. Post-structuralism is virtually synonymous with the work of Jacques Derrida. Structuralists argue that language organizes and constructs their sense of reality — different languages in effect produce different mappings of the real. Structuralism takes two basic ideas from Saussure's work: first, a concern with the underlying relations of texts and practices, the 'grammar' that makes meaning possible. Another is the view that meaning is always the result of the interplay of relationships of selection and combination made possible by the underlying structure. Saussure's model of difference is spatial, in which meaning is made in the relations between signs that are locked together in a self-regulating structure.
