ABSTRACT
Ferdinand de Saussure Swiss linguist and inspiration for modern structuralism through his posthumous Course in General Linguistics, which sought to complement historical, diachronic linguistics with a cross-sectional static or synchronic linguistics. Roland Barthes, French writer and critic influenced by Sartre and Brecht as well as Saussure. From his early Marxist-structuralist Mythologies he progressed through post-structuralism to autobiography. He was never an academic critic, much more the marginal, tubercular intellectual. Claude Levi-Strauss- Anthropologist, for many years professor at the College de France and the key figure in establishing structuralism in France. Any structuralist account of narrative will distinguish between the subject-matter, events or history narrated and their narration, fabulation or discursive rendering. But if structuralism could tell us no more than Somerset Maugham told, it would be nothing to become excited about. Structuralism is, by definition, an historical, synchronic approach to the study of the products of cultural endeavour, considered independently of their authors, consumers and circumstances of production.
