Literary Theory: Post-Structuralism & Deconstruction

2. WHAT IS POST-STRUCTURALISM?
•Post-structuralism can be broadly understood as a body of distinct reactions to
Structuralism.
•However, it is difficult to define or summarize Post-structuralism because:
it rejects definitions that claim to have discovered absolute "truths" or facts about the
world.
very few Post-structural thinkers have willingly accepted the label 'post-structuralist’.
Hence, no one has felt compelled to construct a "manifesto" of post-structuralism.

3. CHARACTERISTICS OF POST-STRUCTURALISM
Post-structuralism sees 'reality' as being much more fragmented, diverse, tenuous
and culture-specific than does structuralism. Consequently, Post-structuralism lays
greater emphasis on:
•Specific histories and local contextualizations;
•The actual insertion of the human into the texture of time and history;
•The specifics of cultural working and cultural practice;
•The role of language and textuality in the construction of reality and identity.

4. STRUCTURALISM V/S POST-STRUCTURALISM
• Structuralism studied the underlying structures in texts and used analytical concepts from
linguistics, psychology, anthropology, and other fields to interpret those structures. It emphasized
the logical and scientific nature of its results.
• Post-structuralism argues that history and culture condition the study of underlying structures, yet
both are subject to biases and misinterpretations. A post-structuralist approach argues that to
understand a text, it is necessary to study both the text itself and the systems of knowledge that
produced it.
• Post-structuralism rejects the idea of a literary text having a single purpose, a single meaning, or
one singular existence. Instead, every individual reader creates a new and individual purpose,
meaning, and existence for a given text.

5. STRUCTURALISM V/S POST-STRUCTURALISM
• Post structuralism retains the emphasis on language of structuralism.
• Post structuralism retains the Structuralist’s belief that all cultural systems can be represented as ‘coded systems of
meaning rather than direct transactions with reality.’
• Many Post-structuralists, namely Foucault, Baudrillard and Barthes, began as Structuralists and moved in the course of their
thought in a Poststructuralist direction.
• Whereas Structuralists claim that independent signifiers are superior to the signified, Post-structuralism views the Signifier
and the Signified as inseparable.
• A post-structuralist critic must be able to utilize a variety of perspectives to create a multifaceted interpretation of a text,
even if these interpretations conflict with one another. It is particularly important to analyse how the meanings of a text shift
in relation to certain variables, usually involving the identity of the reader.

6. POST-STRUCTURALISTS
•ROLAND BARTHES
•JACQUES DERRIDA
•JEAN BAUDRILLARD
•MICHEL FOUCAULT
•JEAN-FRANÇOIS LYOTARD
•NOAM CHOMSKY
•JULIA KRISTEVA
•JUDITH BUTLER

7. MICHEL FOUCAULT
“...For the last ten or fifteen years, the immense and proliferating criticizability of
things, institutions, practices, and discourses; a sort of general feeling that the
ground was crumbling beneath our feet, especially in places where it seemed most
familiar, most solid, and closest to us, to our bodies, to our everyday gestures. But
alongside this crumbling and the astonishing efficacy of discontinuous, particular,
and local critiques, the facts were also revealing something... Beneath this whole
thematic, through it and even within it, we have seen what might be called the
insurrection of subjugated knowledges.”
– FOUCAULT, M. SOCIETY MUST BE DEFENDED, 7 JANUARY 1976, TR. DAVID MACEY

8. ROLAND BARTHES: DEATH OF THE AUTHOR
•The "death" of the author as an authentic source of meaning for a given text.
•Literary texts have multiple meanings.
•The author is not the prime source of the work's semantic content.
•The "death of the author" is the "birth of the reader" as the source of the
proliferation of meanings of the text.

9. JACQUES DERRIDA: DECONSTRUCTION
• A major theory associated with Structuralism is binary opposition. This theory proposes binary
opposites are often arranged in a hierarchy.
• Post-structuralism rejects the notion of the essential quality of the dominant relation in the hierarchy,
choosing rather to expose the dependency of the dominant term on its apparently subservient
counterpart. This act of deconstruction illuminates how male can become female, how speech can
become writing, and how rational can become emotional.
• Deconstruction helps us understand silent voices.
• Deconstruction challenges our perspectives.

10. THAT’S ALL FOR NOW!