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Structuralism was first and foremost a method of analysis that dominated French intellectual life in the 1950s and 1960s. It was not a movement as such but rather a label for a mode of thinking and analysis common to a wide range of disciplines, from mathematics to literary criticism. Structuralism was seen to be applicable to all human social phenomena. The disparate collection of thinkers who are now placed, frequently incorrectly, under the rubric Structuralism do not form a coherent group. These often include the psychologist Jean Piaget (1896-1980); the linguist Roman Jakobson (1896-1982); the literary theorists Roland Barthes (1915-80), Tzvetan Todorov (1939-) and Gérard Genette (1930-); the social theorist Michel Foucault (1926-84); the Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser (1918-90); and, of course, the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. The sources of Structuralism were very eclectic and its influence wide ranging, but it has now =====Dictionary=====
Structuralism, a major current of thought in the second half of the twentieth century, developed in France from the 1960s onward in reaction to existentialism and humanism. From a methodological point of view, in the analysis and understanding of "objects" (especially those in the social sciences), it tended to see "structures" as pre-eminent and to see the given and its directly observable features as mere "effects." [Ed: Quotes indicate jargon terms in structuralism.]
# ——. (1974-1975). Le séminaire: Livre XXII, R.S.I. Ornicar?, 2-5.
# Lévi-Strauss, Claude. (1963). Structural anthropology (Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf, Trans.). New York: Basic Books. (Original work published 1949)
