The Nexus of Hermeneutics and Aesthetics: A Structuralist Reading of Allen Ginsberg's Howl and Other Poems

This paper examines Allen Ginsberg's Howl and Other Poems from Roland Barthes's structuralist perspective. Structuralism is a text-centred school of criticism which looks at the general laws and conventions that govern the various structures of a text especially as they relate to each other. The basis of structuralism is the belief that things cannot be understood in isolation, but in the context of the larger structures they are made of,hence, the term, structuralism. Essentially, this concern with structures cuts across disciplines such as Physics, Biology, Mathematics and Psychology, but what structuralism (in literature) has in common with these other areas of structural concern is an interest in whole rather than in the parts. This is in tandem with Claude Levi-Strauss's structural analysis of myths as a system of relations. The study adopts the Barthesian codal approach in the analysis and interpretation of the poems. From the analysis, the paper finds a yearning for rehabilitation, reintegration, transcendence and order on the part of the members of the Beat Generation which the entire poems centre on as opposed to damnation, rejection and excommunication as well as disbandment which ordinarily remain their ultimate lot even as it upholds structuralism as one of the invaluable tools of literary critical analysis, whose methodology shows the process of decoding a text in relationship to the codes provided by the structure of language itself.