STRUCTURALISM

   Structuralism is a critical theory that became dominant for a short time in the 1970s and 1980s. Because it was partly a reaction to New Criticism, it reevaluated forms of literature and art previously considered non-art, such as Westerns. By the 1980s, makers of cinema Westerns were reevaluating their own genre, and thus structuralist critics were able to decontextualize the films from their associations with low culture and bad taste and to examine the multiple structures of narrative in relation to archetypes, myths, and symbolism. The problem with structuralism as with New Criticism was that it ignored cultural contexts and thus had no way of dealing with such pressing issues as women and Native Americans in Westerns, or with early century American imperialism and colonialism in Westerns. While structuralist critics such as Will Wright in Six Guns and Society (1974) and John G. Cawelti in his original SixGun Mystique (1984) gave Westerns critical respectability, it remained for the cultural critics of the 1990s, such as Richard Slotkin and Jane Tompkins, to open the way for postmodern critical acceptance of cinema Westerns.