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Structuralism, Poststructuralism, and Deconstruction

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Structuralism, Poststructuralism, and Deconstruction • Wednesday’s class at 2pm in N210 with Joannah Bird. Biographical Criticism • How do we include biographical material into our interpretations? • How much information is necessary? • When do we stop researching? • Does the text cast light on its interpretation, or on the author? • Like New Historicism, Biographical criticism sees literary works as situated in specific historical and biographical contexts from which they are generated. It rejects the concept that literary studies should be limited to the internal or formal characteristics of a literary work, and insists that it properly includes a knowledge of the contexts in which the work was created. • We are all part of symbolic systems of discourse. • Many of Dickens’ novels are biographical. • His interpretations of London in his novels explain not only the man, but the way we see the metropolis and its formation in the 19th century. • For example, Dickens shaped how we understand Christmas, and our Christian and social obligations. • Scrooge Charles Dickens (1812-1870) • Although one of the most investigative and engaging bios of Dickens, it is also criticized for its “fantasy” chapters in which Dickens sits down and chats with Wilde, for example • Ackroyd also interviews Dickens. Peter Ackroyd, Dickens (1990) Why I Wrote “The Yellow Wallpaper.” • Reread it • How does it affect your interpretation of the story? • Where do we “see” the author? • Who has interpretive authority, John or the narrator? Structuralism, Post-structuralism, and Deconstruction ENGL 314 Structuralism/Post-structuralism/Deconstruction • Almost all contemporary literary theory, literary pedagogy, and discussions in the Arts and Humanities are premised on these philosophies. • We cannot but help employ their methodologies when we discuss literature. • Key names: Ferdinand Saussure , Roland Barthes, and Jacques Derrida • What: a linguistic theory • Who and When: Ferdinand de Saussure’s (1857- 1913) lecture notes, called Course in General Linguistics were published by his students posthumously in 1916 and translated into English in the late 1950s. • Distinctives: • Emphasized the synchronic (at specific point in time), rather than the diachronic (evolved over time), study of language. • Saussure was interested in the study of langue, not parole. • Principles of language, not the concrete examples Structuralism • The Structuralist view of language: • Sign = signifier | signified 1. Linguistic signs are arbitrary 2. Meaning is relational • E.g. cat, bat, mat • E.g. hovel, shed, hut, house, mansion, palace • Saussure: “In language there are only differences” (qtd. in Bressler 97) • Therefore, when studying a text (literary, cultural), structuralists try to identify the text’s binary oppositions: e.g. day/night, good/evil, soul/body, God/human 3. “Reality” is, to a certain extent, linguistic. Through language we see and know the world. E.g. colours, seasons, etc. (cf. the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis) Structuralism • Structuralism was taken up and applied to many areas of of study, both academic and popular. (This applied structuralism is sometimes called semiotics.) • Major Figures: Claude Lévi-Strauss (myth), Roland Barthes (boxing and wrestling, eating steak with chips, a magazine photograph of an Algerian soldier, etc.), Jonathan Culler, Frank Kermode, Vladimir Propp (folktales) • Structuralism enjoyed popularity in universities in the 1950s and 60s, until the rise of Post-structuralism. Structuralism • Post-structuralism • Comes after structuralism (“post” means “after”) and is a response to it. • Major Figures: Jacques Derrida (1930-2004), Jean- François Lyotard (1924-98), Michel Foucault (1926- 84), Richard Rorty (1931-2007) • Poststructuralists believed the structuralist view of language had not been pushed far enough; it had to be taken to its (more radical) logical conclusions. Post-structuralism • “Meaning is relational” • The dictionary problem • Différance: Deliberate misspelling of différence. The French Différer means both: 1. To differ, be different from 2. To defer, postpone, delay Post-structuralism • “Meaning is relational.” • In every word there is a trace of different, opposing terms. Words “are always ‘contaminated’” (Barry). • E.g. “Guest,” which is cognate with the Latin hostis (“stranger” or “enemy”), carries with it meanings of welcome and unwelcome (or welcome and unwelcome meanings!) • Example in your text: “There will always be a trace of ‘don’t buy this hat’ left in any urging to ‘buy this hat’” (117). Post-structuralism • “Meaning is relational” • The implication: language is too slippery for us to control it. We cannot speak without misspeaking. • Liquid metaphors: “signs float free of what they designate, meanings are fluid, and subject to constant ‘slippage’ or ‘spillage’” (Barry) • E.g. A sign that reads “Important Seniors Meeting” Post-structuralism • Objection: This is ridiculous – we communicate successfully everyday. • Answer: We also worry regularly over our language use because we subconsciously recognize how slippery language can be. Post-structuralism • “Linguistic signs are arbitrary” + “‘Reality’ is linguistic” • Derrida: il n’y a pas de hors-texte • Usually translated “There is nothing outside the text” but could also be translated “There is no outside- text,” or “There is no outside to the text.” • Hors-texte: a technical term for parts of a book not contained in the main page numbers • The search for the transcendental signifier Post-structuralism • Post-structuralism “is the set of assumptions that make deconstruction possible” (Lynn 112). Deconstruction is applied post-structuralism. • The term and theory comes from: • Derrida’s “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences” (paper given at a symposium in 1966) • Further developed in Of Grammatology (1967; translated 1976) • Deconstruction is not destruction, nor is it just another word for “critique.” • ... So what is Deconstruction? Good question... Deconstruction Liberal Humanism: View of Literature • Good literature is of timeless significance. • The text will reveal constants and universal truths about human nature because human nature itself is constant and unchanging. • The subject is the free, unconstrained author of meaning—his actions are rooted in choice • Claims to be universal, but ultimately confirms the concerns and ideals of the ruling class. Upon Seeing an Orange Gender theory asks: What possibilities are available to a woman who eats this orange? To a man? New Criticism asks: What shape and diameter is the orange? Marxism asks: Who owns the orange? Who gets to eat it? Postcolonialism asks: Who doesn’t own the orange? Who took the orange away? Reader Response asks: What does the orange taste like? What does the orange remind us of? Structuralism asks: How are the orange peel and the flesh differentiated into composite parts of the orange? Deconstruction asks: If the orange peel and the flesh are both part of an “orange,” are they not in fact one and the same thing? http://sceopellen.wordpress.com/2008/04/16/literary-theory-and-the-orange/ • Deconstruction is by far the most difficult critical lens for people to understand. • It is an intellectually sophisticated theory that confuses people. • It is a postmodern theory, and like most postmodernism, it questions many of the literary assumptions that have guided us in the past. Deconstruction Structuralism argues that meaning in language derives from its internal logic and formal relationships. We can say, “I see the dog,” but we can’t say, “Dog see I the,” without leaving the listener clueless as to what we mean, even though each word is understandable and familiar. The order of the words and their relationship to one another, i.e. the structure of the sentence, conveys the meaning. Semiotics, as a part of Structuralism, argues that language is a system of signs that may be understood to have meaning through the convention of social acceptance. The sign (or signifier) is not the meaning (the signified) but conveys meaning. The word “cat” is formed by two consonants and a vowel. It has a sound that has nothing to do with a furry domestic animal that purrs. Yet, we agree that when we say “cat,” we intend to refer to the category of animal. For example, an everyday example is a stop sign. In this example, the physical sign is the signifier. The concept of stopping is the signified. =the sign or signifier STOP!!! =the signified However, signfiers can have multiple significations. APPLE FIRE RED Love Blood • MEANING IS THEREFORE FOUND IN THE PROMISE OF STRUCTURES • Deconstruction destabilizes these supposedly sound structures. • Deconstruction is “the careful teasing out of warring forces of signification within the text itself” (Barabara Johnson, qtd. in Lynn 114) Deconstruction • “A text can be read as saying something quite different from what it appears to be saying … it may be read as carrying a plurality of significance or as saying many different things which are fundamentally at variance with, contradictory to and subversive of what may be seen by criticism as a single stable ‘meaning’. Thus a text may ‘betray’ itself.” (s.v. “Deconstruction” in J.A. Cuddon’s Dictionary of Literary Terms, 5th ed.) Deconstruction • Deconstruction can also be thought of as... • Oppositional reading • Reading against the grain • Reading the text against itself • Textual harassment Deconstruction • Both focus on the text, not the author or reader. They have similar methods (attention to formal qualities, diction, figures of speech, tensions
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