When Jakobson writes of the centrality of tropes to imaginative writing, he places the categories of meaning at the heart of the structural method, as tropes, including metaphor and metonymy, are the way we say something by saying something else, figures of signification. When one turns to the internal dynamic of a text as an object, a field of meanings, and to the coherence of it as a text, rather than as biography or sociology, one reads structurally. Structuralist reading abandons pyschological, sociological, and such explanations. Genette mentions the other form of intrinsic criticism, phenomenological criticism, in which one becomes in touch with the subjectivity of the creative voice of the work. This is a little confusing, because this is not hermeneutics properly speaking, but rather phenomenological hermeneutics .
Structuralism ties the meaning of the work to the meanings of the culture.
Topics , or topoi , are structural in that they underlie the way we talk and think about things in our culture. Without conventional expectations we cannot have the difference, the surprise, the reversals which mark the more brilliant exercise of creativity. Hence creativity is in a sense structural, as it depends on our expectation, which it them plays upon. Thus any work becomes the parole , the individual articulation, of a cultural langue , or system of signification. Structuralism studies literature synchronically, but with diachronic awareness.