Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Robert Magliola

Critical Essay by Robert Magliola

[The main concern of this article will be] a structuralist treatment of Dr. Brodie's Report. Structuralist analysis can do either of two things: it can expose the semantic and morphological syntaxes which combine the elements of a story into a whole, or it can show how structuralist intuitions, many of them philosophical in nature, illuminate what a writer is doing. I shall choose the second of these options; in the long run an exposition of the second kind better serves the general reader, since it can be applied with equal validity to everything Borges has written. The first premise of structuralism is that the human mind comes into the world with an a priori structure, and that this structure requires that all data be combined in terms of binary opposition. Each human being perceives the world in binary opposition, or, to be more accurate, he sees the world in terms...
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