Structuralism
Structuralism is a theoretical paradigm in sociology, anthropology and linguistics positing that elements of human culture must be understood in terms of their relationship to a larger, overarching system or structure. It works to uncover the structures that underlie all the things that humans do, think, perceive, and feel.
.. A potential problem of structuralist interpretation is that it can be highly reductive, as scholar Catherine Belsey puts it: “the structuralist danger of collapsing all difference.”[15] An example of such a reading might be if a student concludes the authors of West Side Story did not write anything “really” new, because their work has the same structure as Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. In both texts a girl and a boy fall in love (a “formula” with a symbolic operator between them would be “Boy + Girl”) despite the fact that they belong to two groups that hate each other (“Boy’s Group – Girl’s Group” or “Opposing forces”) and conflict is resolved by their death. Structuralist readings focus on how the structures of the single text resolve inherent narrative tensions.