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UNIT 1 BEGINNING THEORY

Some theoretical differences between structuralism and post-structuralism:

1. Origins: Structuralism derives from linguistics. It too believes in method,

system and reason as being able to establish reliable truths.

Post-structuralism derives ultimately from philosophy. Nietzche’s

remark: “There are no facts, only interpretations”. It regards any
confidence in the scientific method as naïve. We can’t know anything
for certain.

2. Tone and style:

Estructuralists writing tends towards abstraction and generalization
“scientific coolness”. The style is neutral and anonymous.

Post-structuralists writing more emotive urgent and euphoric. Style

flamboyant and self-consciously showy.
Metaphor or the etymology of a word engaged warmth.

3. Attitude to language:
Structuralists accept that the world is constructed through languate in
the sense that we do not have access to reality other than through
the linguistic medium.

Post-structuralism: terminal anxiety about the possibility of achieving

any knowledge through language. The verbal sign is constantly
floating free of the concept. It is supposed to designate. We are not
fully in control of the medium of language. The meanings words have
can never be guaranteed one hundred percent pure. Words are
always contaminated by their opposites or else they are interfered
with their own history.
Linguistic anxiety: keynote.

4. Project: By the fundamental aims of each movement,

Structuralism questions our way of structuring and categorizing reality
and prompts us to break free of habitual modes of perception or
categorisation, but it believes that we can thereby attain a more
reliable view of things.

Post-structuralism is much more fundamental. It distrust the very

notion of reason, and the idea of the human being as an independent
entity, preferring the notion of the “dissolved” or “constructed”
subject t whereby what we may think of as the individual is really a
product of social and linguistic forces.

Post-structuralism – life of a decentred planet

It emerged in France in the late 1960s
Two figures: Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida (1930-2004)
Barthes: The Death of the Author (1968) turns from structuralism to post-
structuralism. The independence of the literary test and its immunity to the
possibility of being unified or limited by any notion or what the author might have

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intended or “crafted” into the work. Instead, the essay makes a declaration of
radial textual independence: the work is not determined by intention or context.
The text seem as something produced by the reader and by language itself.
Jacques Derrida philosophy of Nietzsche and Heidegger, Freud. The “decentring” of
our intellectual universe. These centres were destroyed or eroded caused by
historical events, scientific discoveries, intellectual or artistic revolutions. In the
resulting universe there are no absolutes or fixed points so that the universe we
live in is “decentred” or inherently relativistic. Universe of free play, joyous
freedom, apocalyptic tone.

Stop and think

Reading and interpretation, then, are not just reproducing what the writer thought
and expressed in the text. This inadequate notion of interpretation (doubling
commentary) since it tries to reconstruct a pre-existing, nontextual reality.
Instead critical reading must produce the test. The reading has to be
deconstructive rather than reconstructive.

Structuralism and post-structuralism. Some practical differences.

The post-structuralist literary critic is engaged in the task of “deconstructing” the
text.
Deconstructive reading uncovers the unconscious rather than the conscious
dimension of the text, all the things which its overt textuality glosses over or fails
to recognise.

Textual harassment or oppositional reading the deconstructive process will often

fix on a detail of the text which looks incidental and then use it as the key to the
shole text, so that, everything is read through it.
Text is at war with itself.

The structuralism seeks: The post-structuralism seeks:

Parallels / Echoes Contradictions / paradoxes

Balances Shifts / break in: Tone
Reflections / repetitions Viewpoint
Simmetry Tense
Contrasts Time
Patterns Person
Effect: to show textual unity and Attitude
coherence. Conflicts
Absences / omissions
Linguistic quirks
Aporia
Effect: to show textual disunity

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What post-structuralists critics do

1. Read the text against itself

2. Surface features of the words. Crucial to the overall meaning.
3. Disunity
4. Multiplicities of meaning
5. Discontinuities “fault-lines”

Deconstruction: an example

The three stages of the deconstructive process: the verbal, the textual, and the
linguistic.
 The verbal involves looking in the text for paradoxes and contradictions.
“After the first death there is no other”: This statement contradicts and
refutes itself

 The textual stage of the method. The critic is looking for shifts or breaks in
the continuity of the poem. These shifts reveal instabilities of attitude and
the lack of a fixed and unified position. They may be shifts in focus, in time,
or tone, or point of view, or attitude, or pace, or vocabulary. Looking again
at the poem. Omissions are important here. The text doesn’t tell us things
we would expect to be told.

 The linguistic stage, finale involves looking for moments in the poem. The
whole poem does what it says it won’t do. The speaker professes his refusal
to mourn but the poem itself constituted and act of mourning. In this poem,
Thomas identifies the language trap, and then falls into it. The
deconstructive reading aims to produce disunity, to show that what had
looked like unity and coherence actually contains contradictions and
conflicts which the text cannot stabilise and contain.

The term “aporia” means an impasse and designates a kind of knot in the text
which cannot be unravelled or solved because what is said is self-contradictory.
There is an irreconcilable conflict of meaning within the text.

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