When it comes to structuralism, I find it requires a realistic point of view on how the world is represented, as we are essentially inundated with concepts and signs through the structures of communication and language. In this week's readings I found the ideas behind structuralism to be more in-depth than in my previous exposures, especially looking at Roland Barthes' "The World of Wrestling" from his collection Mythologies. “The World of Wrestling” provided broad insight into how the structuralist idea of ​​difference plays into deriving meaning (or meanings) from literature in countless ways, especially in how the reception of specific mythemes and signifiers evokes structurally conditioned responses by the public. The most important concepts in structuralism lie in the idea of ​​how meaning is derived and in the discovery that the depth or internal structure of meaning creation transcends the power of a single text. However, this does not mean that the word (or individual utterance; Tyson 213) is itself irrelevant, but that it is a reproduction of how meaning is derived from the structures that created the text itself. Instead of viewing text as a self-contained, self-contained object that creates its own objectivity, we instead look at text as an act of communication, similar to a speech act, a statement of a concept that is not the physical representation of the concept. - rather a sign that refers to the concept in an indirect way. The example given in the lecture notes (and in Lois Tyson's Critical Theory Today) revolves around the word book in both French and English. The English word "book" potentially means nothing to a native French speaker; and "Livre" nothing for English, since each is an example of the speakers and... middle of paper...ruralist vision. This understanding of the audience demonstrates how structuralism gets to its point, that the underlying structure of meaning-making can appear in subtle ways, even in the wrestling ring, far from deep concepts like meaning or understanding. Anything that can be determined as a language or expression can base its meaning on a set of structures that produce it, and different structures provide different meanings. All works, however, provide insight into how human understanding is derived, which is one of the advantages of structuralism and its application in literature. Works Cited Bressler, Charles E. Literary Criticism: An Introduction to Theory and Practice. 5th ed. New York: Longman, 2011. Print.Levine, George. "Frankenstein and the tradition of realism". Frankenstein. Ed. J. Paul Hunter. 2nd ed. New York: Norton, 2011. Print.