I'm not going to lie, I was lost at least 3/4 of the time in chapter 5. I could comprehend the words but not what each sentence as a whole was saying.
This is what I got from it though.
Structuralism.
It's not what the text is saying but how it is being said. What a reader should be studying is more of the word choice of the author and less of the meaning behind those words. The reader has to know both the definition of words and also the idioms of phrases in order to understand a text thoroughly. A native speaker doesn't usually have to think and cipher out the meanings of idioms because they are such a part of culture. I can also see that when using a structuralist approach to reading one has to look at the text within the context of the whole genre that it is in. Basically the purpose of reading is breaking the text's code and only when that code is broken can one find the true meaning.
Structuralists are interested in why and how people create symbols in literature; such as darkness equaling evil, or light equalling good, and where these ideas come from. Structuralists are interested in where words come from more than the art of the text itself.
That is all I could glean from this chapter. Please correct me if I'm wrong and I hope you both can shed some light on the chapter for me with your blogs. :)
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This chapter reminded me of what you commented on my blog for last chapter: when are we over analyzing or looking too much into a text? I’m not sure a line can be drawn to show precisely when this happens, but I would certainly think that the moment the author and the reader and taken out of the equation for discovering a text’s meaning, then we have gone too far; at that point, I would say we’re looking too much into it. This is what the structuralist’s approach does.
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