Major Approach: "[he does not seek] to produce a rigorous
structuralist reading of Jefferies' story, but to explain some of the
basic assumptions of the approach, while indicating how it can furnish
tools for literary analysis, focusing the reader's attention on
aspects of the text which might otherwise have remained concealed"
(54). (Therefore he does not really have a major argument.) II. He then (on p. 43
with "Now let us turn to the structuralist adventure of how 'Snowed
Up' comes to have meaning")goes on to examine how some structures of
the text produces meanings--on the syntagmatic pole with the help of III. With the discussion
of the meanings of the crowd, Cowley consciously touches on, and even
moves beyond, the limitations of structuralism. Finally, he admits that "Richard Jeffries remains the donor; for 'Richard Jeffries' authored Edie's story, even if we dispel the referential illusion of the Author. And so the snow begins to melt, and we may admit the noise once more . . ." (implying that the snow is just another layer of language, and that extra-textual can still be brought in the language or the text to disrupts its unity and structure.)
Introductions of Structuralist approaches: 2. Structuralism posits a homology, a corresponding formal organization between the sentence and the structure of more extended signifying systems, such as the textual narrative. Barthes: "a narrative is a long sentence," although it cannot be reduced to 'the simple sum of its sentences.' p. 46. 3. Reading is not just a matter of moving from one word to the next, but crucially involves movement across levels of meaning. p. 46. ¡@
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