ABSTRACT
Claude Levi-Strauss (b. 1908) is not a literary critic, but a social anthropologist. He is represented in this Reader partly because his work on myth and mythologies impinges on literary studies, but more importantly because his intellectual aims and methods have been found capable of wider application in the field of literary criticism. The general term for these aims and methods is 'structuralism'-one that derives from modern linguistics as variously practised by Saussure, Jakobson, and Chomsky. Structural linguistics goes beyond the description of any particular language to pursue the 'deep structures' that are common to all languages, and in the first example given by Levi-Strauss in the extract printed below, the social anthropologist tries to analyse the various manifestations of the incest taboo in the same way. Structuralism, therefore, is concerned to discover universal truths about the human mind, and this entails working at a very high level of generalityat the level, sometimes, of algebra.
