Bracketing

Literary language is special in announcing itself as language: it pulls attention toward the signifier, laying bare its devices, rather than acting as an invisible camera trained on the signified.

Put simply Shklovsky: the language of literature is special because it draws attention to itself as language and shows how it works. It points you to the words themselves, rather than acting as an invisible camera on the thing described.

Structuralism responds to problems that preoccupied earlier thinkers, teleology and subjectivity, by diminishing both: in some ways it brackets history and the subject.

Put simply Shore: earlier thinkers worried about where history is heading and about the individual self. Structuralism handles both by making them matter less; in a way it sets history and the self aside.

Proper study of language brackets the signified, the real cat the word points to, and examines how signs work as a system at one moment.

Put simply Saussure: to study language properly, set aside the real things words point to, such as the actual cat. Look instead at how words work together as a system at a given moment.

In the text In the Course in General Linguistics (1916; Baskin translation, p. 66), Saussure writes: "The linguistic sign unites, not a thing and a name, but a concept and a sound-image."

Bracketing subject and object alike and studying only how signifiers interact is structuralism's own route past the bridge problem of how subject reaches world.

Put simply Shore: philosophy long asked how the mind can reach the world outside it. Structuralism sidesteps the question by setting aside both mind and world and studying only how signs relate to one another.