Concept information
Preferred term
French structuralism
Definition
- Structuralism is a powerful theoretical framework that dominated French thought in the 1960s. Deriving from the insights of the Swiss Linguist Ferdinand de Saussure and receiving its most comprehensive expression in the anthropology of Claude Lévi-Strauss, the structuralist paradigm also operates in the political philosophy of Louis Althusser, the psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan, the “narratology” of Roland Barthes, the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu, the “history” of Michel Foucault, and the genre studies of Tzvetan Todorov. Uniting a generation of intellectuals against the postwar hegemony of Sartre's existentialism, with its emphases on the individual will and the act but also defined against phenomenologists such as Merleau-Ponty, structuralists were interested in the ways that acts were constructed by forces beyond individual consciousness. [Source: Encyclopedia of Anthropology; French Structuralism]
Broader concept
Belongs to group
URI
https://concepts.sagepub.com/social-science/concept/French_structuralism
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