With the work of the Prague school, the term 'structuralism' comes more or less to merge with the word 'semiotics'. 'Semiotics', or 'semiology', means the systematic study of signs, and this is what literary structuralists are really doing.

What semiotics represents, in fact, is literary criticism transfigured by structural linguistics, rendered a more disciplined and less impressionisticenterprise

Yury Lotman used the imagery of cybernetics to show how the poem formed a complex organic totality

Writing seems to rob me of my being: it is a second-hand mode of communication, a pallid, mechanical transcript of speech, and so always at once remove from my consciousness

'Teleology', thinking of life, language and history in terms of its orientation to a telos or end, is a way of ordering and ranking meanings in a hierarchy of significance, creating a pecking order among them in the light of an ultimate purpose.

deconstruction shows this by fastening on the 'symptomatic' points, the aporia or impasses of meaning

the task of the critic is to subsume them into an atemporal frame of explanation

Language is Barthes's theme from beginning to end, and in particular the Saussurean insight that the sign is always a matter of historical and cultural convention.

the saturation of the reading public by a 'mass', profit-hungry, anodyne culture

recommend various brands of portentous mysticism as the solution to human ills