Critic speak is tough, but we've got you covered.
Quote :"An Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative"
"[I]t is normal that structuralism in the early stages, should have made narrative a primary concern. For is it not one of structuralism's main preoccupations to control the infinite variety of speech acts by attempting to describe the language or langue from which they originate, and from which they can be derived? Faced with an infinite number of narratives and the many standpoints from which they can be considered….the analyst is roughly in the same situation as Saussure, who was faced with desultory fragments of language, seeking to extract, from the apparent anarchy of messages, a classifying principle and a central vantage point for his description."
Barthes was one of the first literary theorists to explicitly outline the parallels between structural linguistics and literary criticism. A literary critic who studies literature, Barthes says, is in a very similar position to Saussure, the father of structuralism. Saussure saw a whole bunch of messy sentences, utterances, and speech acts, none of which seemed to have anything to do with one another. His task was to find the logic governing this messy bunch of unrelated phrases and sentences. In a similar way, a literary critic faces with an endless number of narratives—from novels to plays to short stories to poems. The critic's task, like Saussure's, is to find and understand the deep structure from which these narratives emerge, despite the fact that they all have different plots, structures, main characters, and happy or unhappy endings.
Conclusion: literary criticism has a lot in common with structural linguistics.
Quote :"An Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative"
"[I]t is obvious that discourse itself (as an arrangement of sentences) is organized, and that, through this organization, it is perceived as the message of another "language," functioning at a higher level than the language of linguistics: discourse has its units, its rules, its "grammar." Because it lies beyond the sentence, and though consisting of nothing but sentences, discourse must naturally be the object of a second linguistics….although discourse constitutes an autonomous object of study, it must be studied from the vantage point of linguistics….it is most reasonable to postulate a homologous relation between sentence and discourse…Discourse would then be a large "sentence"…in the same way that a sentence, allowing for certain specifications, is a small "discourse."
A discourse is made up of a whole bunch of texts. A literary discourse, for example, is made up of fairy tales and novels and plays and poetry and short stories. Each of these texts is made up of sentences. Just as a sentence is governed by grammar rules, so a discourse is also governed by rules. In other words a discourse is like a very big, very long, very complicated sentence. So it follows that we literary critics should approach a discourse in the same way that a linguist approaches a sentence: We should aim to identify and understand its rules and structure. In this sense, we literary critics are "linguists" too, because we're trying to do what a linguist does. The difference is we're doing all that in relation to narratives, not sentences.
Once again, here we see Barthes outlining the parallels between literary criticism and linguistics. He's making a jump from the study of small units of narrative (sentences) to the study of large units of narrative (novels, plays, poetry etc.). The task of the critic is to treat a discourse like a sentence: find its grammar.