Post-new criticism

Abstract

Structuralism, an analytical method introduced to anthropology by Claude Lévi-Strauss but used in literary criticism as well, assumes repetitive phenomena reveal unconscious but consistent laws in everything from the lives of primitive peoples to the works of novelists and poets. Tobin Siebers’s structuralist study of The Turn of the Screw begins with Tzvetan Todorov’s assertion that narratives dealing with the supernatural should be read in terms of their use of the concept of hesitation. James’s tale is filled with hesitations and then headlong plunges on the part of the governess, actions paralleled by the reader who judges the governess sane and the ghosts real (or vice versa) by ‘excluding chaotic elements’, which is what tribal societies do when they make myths (p.568).