structuralism and Miss Sanchez

The first class that I've come to like this semester is CL 111 or The Short Story. Supposedly, The Sir Butch Dalisay is our teacher. But he is in the States at present, which is why, Miss Anna Sanchez (spelling check!) is filling in for him. The first things that she told us in class were: "I'm a fan of Sir Dalisay" and "I'd enliken my filling in for him to that of John the Baptist's preparing the way for Jesus Christ." Weird no?

But I like the way Miss Sanchez teaches in an objective way, very much different from the way my past teachers have taught their classes. Most of the CL teachers have biases. Most of them are Marxists and well, you just have to live with them. Otherwise, you'd be battling against a tsunami of some sorts. This is to say that living with them is not the same as agreeing with them.

Anyway, the first thing that we talked about in class is the short story as a structure. This means that the short story, just like any other genre of literature, has a framework or a pattern. It has parts and elements. You know, the plot, the characters, the theme, the symbolism, etc. etc. What amazed me much was this anti-structuralist opinion that as a structure, the short story loses its human-ness. I read through my year-old readings on the structuralist theory. And strangely, there were many notes on anti-structuralism on the structuralism pages. Weird.

Since I didn't get to give my opinion in class, I'd just state it here: I think that giving a literary piece some sort of structure doesn't make it less human. After all, the structure is made by humans. What makes the piece less human is when the author becomes more concerned with the mechanisms underlying the story than with the story itself. As with our everyday dealings, if we focus more on the 'work' and lose sight of 'why' we do the work, we become somewhat mechanical. I don't know if you're getting my point.



.