Literary Research: Structuralism and Semiotics

"In the study of literary works, structuralism is distinguished by its rejection of those traditional notions according to which literature ‘expresses’ an author's meaning or ‘reflects’ reality. Instead, the ‘text’ is seen as an objective structure activating various codes and conventions which are independent of author, reader, and external reality."... Ferdinand de Saussure and Charles Sanders Peirce are recognized as the founders of the modern European and Anglo-American traditions of semiotics. Literary semiotics can be seen as a branch of the general science of signs that studies a particular group of texts within verbal texts in general."