POSTSRTUCTURALISM
Name : Patel Krishna K.
Roll No. :- 16
Batch :- 2018 – 2020
Enrolment No. :- 2069108420190035
Email Id. :- krishnadobariya08@gmail.com
Course :- M.A. English
Paper No. :- 07 Literary Theory and
Criticism 2 (20th Century
Western and Indian Poetics)
Topic :- Poststructuralism
Submitted to :- Smt. S. B. Gardi
Department of English MKBU
Poststructuralism:-
Poststructuralism designated a broad variety of
critical perspective and procedures that in the 1970s displace structuralism
from its prominence as the radically innovative way of dealing with language
and other signifying systems. A conspicuous announcement to American Scholars
of the Poststructural point of view was Jacques Derrida’s paper on “structure ,
sign, and play in the discourse of the Human Science,” delivered in 1966 to an
International Colloquium at Johns Hopkins University. Derrida attacked the
systematic, quasi – scientific pretensions of the strict form of structuralism
– derived from Saussure’s concept of the structure of language and represented
by the cultural anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss by asserting that the notion
of a systematic structure, whether linguistic or other, presupposes a fixed
“center” that serves to organize and regulate the structure yet itself “escapes
structurality”. In Saussure’s theory of language, for example, this center is
assigned the function of controlling the endless differential play of internal
relationships, while remaining itself outside of and immune from that play. As
Derrida’s other writings make clear, he regards this incoherent and
unrealizable notion of an ever – active yet always absent center as only one of
the many ways in which all of Western thinking is logocentric or dependent on
the notion of a self – certifying foundation, or absolute, or essence, or
ground which is ever needed but never present. Other contemporary thinkers ,
including Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, and Roland Barthes , although in
diverse claims for the existence of self – evident foundations that guarantee
the Validity of all knowledge and truth, and establish the possibility of
determinate communication. This antifoundationalism in philosophy, conjioned
with skepticism about traditional conceptions of meaning, knowledge, truth,
value and the subject of “self” is evident in some current exponents of diverse
modes of literary studies, including feminist, new historicist, and reader
response criticism. In its extreme forms, the poststructural claim is that the
workings of language inescapably undermine meaning in the very process of
making such meanings possible, or else that every mode of discourse
“constructs” or constitutes , the very facts or truths or knowledge that it
claims to discover.
Postmodern
is sometimes used in place of or interchangeably with postsructural. It is more
useful, however to follow the example of those who apply postmodern to recent
developments in literature and other arts and reserve poststructural for recent
theories of criticism and of intellectual inquiries in general.
Sailent
features or themes that are sharred by diverse types of poststructural thought
and criticism include the following:
·
The
primacy of theory. Since Plato and Aristotle, discourse about poetry or
literature has involved a theory in the traditional sense of a conceptual
scheme, or set of principles, distinctions and categories. Some times explicit,
but often only implied in critical practice for identifying, classifying,
analyzing, and evaluating works of literature.
In poststructuaral criticism what is called
theory has come to be foreground so that many critics have felt it incumbent to
theorize their individual positions and practices. The nature of theory
however, is conceived in a new and very inclusive ways; for the word theory,
standing without qualification often designates an account of the general
conditions of signification that determine meaning and interpretation in all
domains of human action, production, and intellection. In most case, this
account is held to apply not only to verbal language, but also to psychosexual
and sociocultural signifying systems. As a consequence the pursuit of litereary
criticism is conceived to be integral with all the other pursuits traditionally
classified as the human sciences, and to be inseparable from consideration of
the general nature of human subjectivity, and also from reference to all forms
of social and cultural phenomena. Often the theory of signification is granted
primacy in the additional sense that, when common experience in the use or
interpretation of language does not accord with what the theory entails such
experiences is rejected as unjustified and illusory, or else is accounted an
ideologically imposed concealment of the actual operation of the signifying
system.
A prominent aspect of poststructural theories
is that they are posed in opposition to inherited ways of thinking in all
provinces of knowledge. That is, they expressly challenge and undertaken to
destabilize, and in many instances to undermine and subvert, what they identify
as the foundational assumptions, concepts, procedures and findings in
traditional modes of thinking of discourse in Western civilization . In a
number of politically oriented critics this questioning of established ways of
thinking and of formulating knowledge is joined to an adversarial stance toward the established institutions,
class structure and practice of economic and political power and social organization.
·
The
decentering of the subject. The oppositional stance of many poststructuarl
critics is manifested in a sharp critique of what they call humanism that is of
the traditionally view that the human being or human author is a coherent
identity, endowed with purpose and initiative whose designs and intentions
effectuate the form and meaning of a literary or other products. For such
traditional terms as human being or individual or self poststructuralists
substitute subject because this word is divested of the connotation that it has
originating or controlling power, and instead suggests that the human being is
subjected to the play of eternal forces and also because the word suggests the
grammatical term the subject of a sentences which is an empty slot, to be
filled by whoever happens to be speaking at a particular time and place.
Structuralism had already tended to divest the subject of operative initiative
and control evacuating the purposive human agent into a mere location or space
wherein the differential elements and codes of a systematic langue precipitate
into a particular Parole, or signifying product. Derrida, however, by deleting
the structural linguistic center, had thereby also eliminated the possibility
of a controlling agency in language, leaving the use of language an unregulatable
play of purely relational elements.
·
Reading,
text, and writing . The decentring or deletion of the author leaves the reader
or interpreter, as the focal figure in poststructural accounts of signifying
practices. This figure, however, like the author is stripped of the traditional
attributes of purposiveness and initiative and converted into an impersonal
process called reading. What this reading engages is no longer called a
literary work, instead, reading engages a text that is a structure of signifiers regarded merely as
a given for the reading process. Texts in their turn lose their individuality
and are often represented as manifestations of scripture that is of an all
inclusive textuality, or writing in general in which the traditional boundaries
between literary philosophical ,historical, legal and other classes of texts
are considered to be both artificial and superficial,
·
The concept of discourse. Literary critics had long made
casual use of the term “discourse” especially in application to passages
representing conversations between characters in a literary work, and in the
1970s there developed a critical practice called discoursed analysis which
focuses on such conversational exchanges. This type of criticism deals with
literary discourse as conducted by human characters whose voices engage in a
dynamic interchange of beliefs, attitudes, sentiments, and other expressions of
states of consciousness.
In poststructural
criticism , discourse has become very prominent term, supplementing text as the
name for the structural usage, however the term is not confined to
conversational passages but, like writing designates all verbal constructions
an implies the superficiality of the boundaries between literary and non
literary modes of signification. Most conspicuously, discourse as social parlance,
or language in use and consider to it to be both the product and manifestation
not of a timeless linguistic system, but of particular social conditions, class
structures and power relationships that alter drastically in the course of
history. In Michel Foucault, discourse as such is the central subject of
analytic concern.
·
Many
socially oriented analysts of discourse share with other poststructuralists the
conviction that no text means what it seems to say or what its writer intended
to say. But whereas deconstructive critics attribute the subversion of the apparent meaning to the unstable and self
conflicting nature of language itself, social analysts of discourse and also
psychoanalytic critics view the surface or manifest meanings of a text as a
disguise or substitution, for underlying meanings which cannot be overtly said
because they are suppressed by psychic or ideological ,or discursive
necessities. By some critics, the covert meanings are regarded as having been
suppressed by all three of these forces together. Both the social and
psychoanalytic critics of discourse therefore interpret the manifest meanings of
a text as a distortion, displacement or total occlusion of its real meanings;
and these real meanings in accordance with the critic’s theoretical orientation
,turn out to be either the writer’s psychic and psycho – linguistic
compulsions, or the material realities of history , or the social power
structures of domination ,subordination and marginalization that obtained when
the text was written.
·
Many
poststructural theorists propose or assume an extreme form of evaluative
relativism. The claim is that, in the absence of an absolute and atemporal
standerd or foundation or center all asserted values are relative to the
predominant culture at a given time and place; or to a particular economic,
social, ethnic, or interpretative class; or to the psychic configuration of a
predominant culture at a given time and place , or to the psychic configuration
of a particular individual or type of individuals. Such a general relativism is
affirmed even by some theorist who are also political activists, and advocate
emancipation and equality for sexual, racial, ethnic, or other oppressed,
marginalized, or excluded minorities.
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