© 2010 Steve Campsall
| BINARY | OPPOSITION |
| BINARY | OPPOSITION |
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The ways by which texts - whether literary, non-fictional or media - create meaning in their audience has been at the centre of academic thinking for a very long time. It's also at the centre of your own studies and the better you are at unpicking the various layers of meaning that 'hide away' between the lines of a text, the higher will be your mark.
Binary
opposition is
an idea taken from a theory called structuralism.
This theory attempts to explain how we create meaning from texts - indeed, not
only from texts, but from anything and everything. The theory provides you with a
subtle yet straightforward means of analysing many texts and it will reveal the
moist subtle of effects that a text has on its audience.
The technique can be applied to literature, poetry, drama, non-fiction and media texts. It reveals how innocent-seeming, 'ordinary' words and phrases can operate in ways that are far from innocent and shows how such words can be reinforcing particular - and often stereotypical - ways of thinking, i.e. it can reveal the subtle ideological power of language.
The idea was developed by various linguists and philosophers such as Claude Levi-Strauss, Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida. These theorists were fascinated by the earlier twentieth century work of the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure and they went on to develop Saussure's work in interesting and useful ways.
