Hello everyone!
I am Nidhi Jethava and I am a student of MK Bhavnagar University department of English. This is my assignment about criticism and Film Studies India English literature.
Name : Nidhi P. Jethava
Paper : 204
Roll No. : 13
Enrollment Number : 306920200009
Email ID : jethavanidhi8@gmail.com
Batch : 20-22( MA SEM- 3)
Submitted to : S. B. Gardi Department of English, Maharaja KrishnaKumarsinhji Bhavnagar University.
Structuralism and post-Structuralism
Answer :-
The advent of critical theory in the post-war period, which comprised various complex disciplines like linguistics, literary criticism, Psychoanalytic Criticism, Structuralism, Postcolonialism etc., proved hostile to the liberal consensus which reigned the realm of criticism between the 1930s and `50s. Among these overarching discourses, the most controversial were the two intellectual movements, Structuralism and Poststructuralism originated in France in the 1950s and the impact of which created a crisis in English studies in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Language and philosophy are the major concerns of these two approaches, rather than history or author.
Structuralism which emerged as a trend in the 1950s challenged New Criticism and rejected Sartre‘s existentialism and its notion of radical human freedom; it focused instead how human behaviour is determined by cultural, social and psychological structures. It tended to offer a single unified approach to human life that would embrace all disciplines. Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida explored the possibilities of applying structuralist principles to literature. Jacques Lacan studied psychology in the light of structuralism, blending Freud and Saussure. Michel Foucault‘s The Order of Things examined the history of science to study the structures of epistemology (though he later denied affiliation with the structuralist movement). Louis Althusser combined Marxism and Structuralism to create his own brand of social analysis.
Structuralism, in a broader sense, is a way of perceiving the world in terms of structures. First seen in the work of the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss and the literary critic Roland Barthes, the essence of Structuralism is the belief that “things cannot be understood in isolation, they have to be seen in the context of larger structures they are part of”, The contexts of larger structures do not exist by themselves, but are formed by our way of perceiving the world. In structuralist criticism, consequently, there is a constant movement away from the interpretation of the individual literary work towards understanding the larger structures which contain them. For example, the structuralist analysis of Donne‘s poem Good Morrow demands more focus on the relevant genre (alba or dawn song), the concept of courtly love, etc., rather than on the close reading of the formal elements of the text.
The fundamental belief of Structuralism, that all human activities are constructed and not natural or essential, pervades all seminal works of Structuralism. Beginning with the trailblazers, Levi Strauss and Barthes, the other major practitioners include A. J. Greimas, Vladimir Propp, Terence Hawkes (Structuralism and Semiotics), Robert Scholes (Structuralism in Literature), Colin MacCabe, Frank Kermode and David Lodge (combined traditional and structuralist approaches in his book Working with Structuralism). The American structuralists of the 1960s were Jonathan Culler and the semioticians C. S. Peirce, Charles Morris and Noam Chomsky.
With its penchant for scientific categorization, Structuralism suggests the interrelationship between “units” (surface phenomena) and “rules” (the ways in which units can be put together). In language, units are words and rules are the forms of grammar which order words.
Structuralists believe that the underlying structures which organize rules and units into meaningful systems are generated by the human mind itself and not by sense perception. Structuralism tries to reduce the complexity of human experiences to certain underlying structures which are universal, an idea which has its roots in the classicists like Aristotle who identified simple structures as forming the basis of life. A structure can be defined as any conceptual system that has three properties: “wholeness” (the system should function as a whole), “transformation” (system should not be static), and “self-regulation (the basic structure should not be changed).
Structuralism in its inchoate form can be found in the theories of the early twentieth century Swiss linguist, Ferdinand de Saussure (Course in General Linguistics, 1916), who moved away from the then prevalent historical and philological study of language (diachronic) to the study of the structures, patterns and functions of language at a particular time (synchronic). Saussure’s idea of the linguistic sign is a seminal concept in all structuralist and poststructuralist discourses. According to him, language is not a naming process by which things get associated with a word or name. The linguistic sign is made of the union of “signifier” (sound image, or “psychological imprint of sound”) and “signified” (concept). In this triadic view, words are “unmotivated signs,” as there is no inherent connection between a name (signifier) and what it designates (signified).
The painting This is Not a Pipe by the Belgian Surrealist artist Rene Magritte explicates the treachery of signs and can be considered a founding stone of Structuralism. Foucault‘s book with the same title comments on the painting and stresses the incompatibility of visual representation and reality.
Saussure’s theory of language emphasizes that meanings are arbitrary and relational (illustrated by the reference to 8.25 Geneva to Paris Express in Course in General Linguistics; the paradigmatic chain hovel-shed-hut-house-mansion-palace, where the meaning of each is dependent upon its position in the chain; and the dyads male-female, day-night etc. where each unit can be defined only in terms of its opposite). Saussurean theory establishes that human being or reality is not central; it is language that constitutes the world. Saussure employed a number of binary oppositions in his lectures, an important one being speech/writing. Saussure gives primacy to speech, as it guarantees subjectivity and presence, whereas writing, he asserted, denotes absence, of the speaker as well as the signified. Derrida critiqued this as phonocentrism that unduly privileges presence over absence, which led him to question the validity of all centres.
Saussure’s use of the terms Langue (language as a system) and Parole an individual. utterance in that language, which is inferior to Langue) gave structuralists a way of thinking about the larger structures which were relevant to literature. Structuralist narratology, a form of Structuralism espoused by Vladimir Propp, Tzvetan Todorov, Roland Barthes and Gerard Genette illustrates how a story’s meaning develops from its overall structure, (langue) rather than from each individual story’s isolated theme (parole). To ascertain a text’s meaning, narratologists emphasize grammatical elements such as verb tenses and the relationships and configurations of figures of speech within the story. This demonstrates the structuralist shift from authorial intention to broader impersonal Iinguistic structures in which the author’s text (a term preferred over “work”) participates.
Structuralist critics analyse literature on the explicit model of structuralist linguistics. In their analysis they use the linguistic theory of Saussure as well as the semiotic theory developed by Saussure and the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce. According to the semiotic theory, language must be studied in itself, and Saussure suggests that the study of language must be situated within the larger province of Semiology, the science of signs.
Semiology understands that a word’s meaning derives entirely from its difference from other words in the sign system of language (eg: rain not brain or sprain or rail or roam or reign). All signs are cultural constructs that have taken on their meaning through repeated, learned, collective use. The process of communication is an unending chain of sign production which Peirce dubbed “unlimited semiosis”. The distinctions of symbolic, iconic and indexical signs, introduced by the literary theorist Charles Sande Peirce is also a significant idea in Semiology. The other major concepts associated with semiotics are “denotation” (first order signification) and “connotation” (second order signification).
Structuralism was anticipated by the Myth Criticism of Northrop Frye, Richard Chase, Leslie Fiedler, Daniel Hoffman, Philip Wheelwright and others which drew upon anthropological and physiological bases of myths, rituals and folk tales to restore spiritual content to the alienated fragmented world ruled by scientism, empiricism and technology. Myth criticism sees literature as a system based or recurrent pattern.
Post-Structuralism
Poststructuralism designates a broad variety of critical perspectives and procedures that in the 1970s displaced 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 Sciences,” delivered in 1966 to an International Colloquium at Johns Hopkins University. (The paper is included in Derrida’s Writing and Difference, 1978.) 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 Lévi-Strauss—by asserting that the notion of a systemic 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. (See structuralism.) As Derrida’s other writings made clear, he regarded 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. See deconstruction. Other contemporary thinkers, including Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, and (in his later phase) Roland Barthes, although in diverse ways, also undertook to “decenter” or “undermine” or “subvert” traditional 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, conjoined with skepticism about traditional conceptions of meaning, knowledge, truth, value, and the subject or “self,” is evident in some (although not all) 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 meanings 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, “poststructural.” It is more useful, however, to follow the example of those who apply “postmodern” to developments in literature and other arts, and reserve “poststructural” for theories of criticism and of intellectual inquiries in general. (See modernism and postmodernism.) Salient features or themes that are shared by diverse types of poststructural thought and criticism include the following: 1. 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—sometimes explicit, but often only implied in critical practice—for identifying, classifying, analyzing, and evaluating works of literature. (See criticism.) In poststructural criticism what is called “theory” came to be foregrounded, so that many critics felt it incumbent to “theorize” their individual positions and practices. The nature of theory, however, was conceived in a new and very inclusive way; for the word theory, standing without qualification, often designated an account of the general conditions of signification that determine meaning and interpretation in all domains of human action, production, and intellection. In most cases, this account was held to apply not only to verbal language, but also to psychosexual and sociocultural “signifying systems.” As a consequence, the pursuit of literary criticism was 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 was 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 experience is rejected as unjustified and illusory, or else is accounted an ideologically imposed concealment of the actual operation of the signifying syste 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 undertake 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 discourse in Western civilization (including literary criticism). 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 established institutions, class structures, and practices of economic and political power and social organization. 2. The decentering of the subject. The oppositional stance of many poststructural critics is manifested in a sharp critique of what they call “humanism”; that is, of the traditional view that the human being or human author is a coherent identity, endowed with purpose and initiative, whose design and intentions effectuate the form and meaning of a literary or other product. (See humanism.) For such traditional terms as “human being” or “individual” or “self” poststructuralists tend to 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 external forces; and also because the word suggests the grammatical term, the “subject” of a sentence, 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 and undecidable play of purely relational elements. In the view of many deconstructive critics, the subject or author or narrator of a text becomes itself a purely linguistic 310 POSTSTRUCTURALISM product—as Paul DeMan has put it in Allegories of Reading (1979), we “rightfully reduce” the subject “to the status of a mere grammatical pronoun.” Alternatively, the subject-author is granted at most the function of trying (although always vainly) to “master” the incessant freeplay of the decentered signifiers. For a collection of essays on “the subject” in writings on politics, philosophy, psychoanalysis, and history, see Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connor, Jean-Luc Nancy, eds., Who Comes After the Subject? (1991). Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes both signalized the evacuation of the traditional conception of the subject who is an author by announcing the “disappearance of the author,” or even more melodramatically, “the death of the author.” (Foucault, “What Is an Author,” 1969, in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, 1977; Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” 1968, in Image, Music, Text, 1977.) They did not mean to deny that a human individual is a necessary link in the chain of events that results in a parole or text. What they denied was the validity of the “function,” or “role” hitherto assigned in Western discourse to a uniquely individual and purposive author, who is conceived as the cogito, or origin of all knowledge; as the initiator, purposive planner, and (by his or her intentions) the determiner of the form and meanings of a text; and as the “center,” or organizing principle, of the matters treated in traditional literary criticism and literary history. In addition, a number of current forms of psychoanalytic, Marxist, and new historicist criticism manifest a similar tendency to decenter, and in extreme cases to delete, what is often called the “agency” of the author as a self-coherent, purposive, and determinative human being. Instead, the human agent is said to be a disunified subject that is the product of diverse psychosexual conditions, and subjected to the uncontrollable workings of unconscious compulsions. Alternatively, the subject is held to be no more than a “construction” by current forms of ideology; or a “site” traversed by the cultural constructs and the discursive formations engendered by the conceptual and power configurations in a given era. (See author and authorship.) 3. Reading, texts, and writing. The decentering 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” (since this traditional term implies a purposive human maker of the product); instead, reading engages a “text”—that is, a structure of signifiers regarded merely as a given for the reading process. Texts in their turn (especially in deconstructive criticism) lose their individuality, and are often represented as manifestations of écriture—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. See text and writing (écriture). A distinctive poststructural view is that no text can mean what it seems to say. To a deconstructive critic, for example, a text is a chain of POSTSTRUCTURALISM 311 signifiers whose seeming determinacy of meaning, and seeming reference to an extra-textual world, are no more than “effects” produced by the differential play of conflicting internal forces which, on closer analysis, turn out to deconstruct the text into an undecidable scatter of opposed significations. In the representation of Roland Barthes, the “death” of the author frees the reader to enter the literary text in whatever way he or she chooses, and the intensity of pleasure yielded by the text becomes proportionate to the reader’s abandonment of limits on its signifying possibilities. In Stanley Fish’s version of reader-response criticism, all the meanings and formal features seemingly found in a text are projected into the printed marks by each individual reader; any agreement about meaning between two individuals is contingent upon their happening to belong to a single one among many diverse “interpretive communities.” 4. 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 discourse analysis which focuses on such conversational exchanges. This type of criticism (as well as the dialogic criticism inaugurated by Mikhail Bakhtin) 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 a very prominent term, supplementing (and in some cases displacing) “text” as the name for the verbal material which is the primary concern of literary criticism. In poststructural usage, however, the term is not confined to conversational passages but, like “writing,” designates all verbal constructions and implies the superficiality of the boundaries between literary and nonliterary modes of signification. Most conspicuously, discourse has become the focal term among critics who oppose the deconstructive concept of a “general text” that functions independently of particular historical conditions. Instead, they conceive of discourse as social parlance, or languagein-use, and consider 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. Foucault conceives that “discourse” is to be analyzed as totally anonymous, in that it is simply “situated at the level of the ‘it is said’ (on dit).” (The Archaeology of Knowledge, 1972, pp. 55, 122.) For example, new historicists (for whom, in this respect, Foucault serves as a model) may attend to all Renaissance references to usury as part of an anonymous “discourse,” which circulates through legal, religious, philosophical, and economic writings of the era; it circulates also through those literary writings, such as Shakespeare’s sonnets or The Merchant of Venice, in which usury is alluded to, whether literally or figuratively. Any allusion to usury is conceived to be better understood if it is referred to the total body of 312 POSTSTRUCTURALISM discourse on that topic, as well as to the social forces and institutions that have produced the conception of usury at that time and in that place. 5. Many socially oriented analysts of discourse share with other poststructuralists the conviction (or at any rate the strong suspicion) 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 a particular critic’s theoretical orientation, turn out to be either the writer’s psychic and psycholinguistic compulsions, or the material realities of history, or the social power structures of domination, subordination, and marginalization that obtained when the text was written. The widespread poststructural view that the surface or overt meanings of a literary or other text serve as a “disguise” or “mask” of its real meanings, or subtext, has been called, in a phrase taken from the French philosopher of language Paul Ricoeur, a hermeneutics of suspicion. 6. Many poststructural theorists propose or assume an extreme form of both cognitive and evaluative relativism. The claim is that, in the absence of an absolute and atemporal standard or foundation or center, all asserted truths and values and cultural norms are relative to the predominant culture at a given time and place; or else to the ideology of a particular economic, social, ethnic, or interpretive class; or else to the subjective conditions of a particular individual or type of individuals. A general relativism is affirmed even by some theorists who are also political activists, and advocate (by explicit or implicit appeal to social justice as a fundamental and universal value) emancipation and equality for sexual, racial, ethnic, or other oppressed, marginalized, or excluded minorities. The primacy of “theory” in poststructural criticism has evoked countertheoretical challenges, most prominently in an essay “Against Theory” by Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels (1982). Defining theory (in consonance with the widespread poststructural use of the term) as “the attempt to govern interpretations of particular texts by appealing to an account of interpretation in general,” the two authors claim that this is an impossible endeavor “to stand outside practice in order to govern practice from without,” assert that accounts of interpretation in general entail no consequences for the actual practice of interpretation, and conclude that all theory “should therefore come to an end.” Such a conclusion is supported by a number of writers, including Stanley Fish and the influential philosophical pragmatist POSTSTRUCTURALISM 313 Richard Rorty, who (despite disagreements in their supporting arguments) agree that no general account of interpretation entails particular consequences for the actual practice of literary interpretation and criticism. (See W. J. T. Mitchell, ed., Against Theory: Literary Studies and the New Pragmatism, 1985, which includes the initiating essay plus a supplementary essay by Knapp and Michaels, together with essays and critiques by Fish, Rorty, E. D. Hirsch, and others.) The French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard has also mounted an influential attack against “theory,” which he regards as an attempt to impose a common vocabulary and set of principles in order illegitimately to control and constrain the many independent “language-games” that constitute discourse; see his The Postmodern Condition (1984). One response to this skepticism about the efficacy of theory on practice (a skepticism that is often labeled the new pragmatism) is that, while no general theory of meaning entails consequences for the practice of interpretation (in the strict logical sense of “entails”), it is a matter of common observation that diverse current theories have in actual fact served both to foster and to corroborate diverse and novel interpretive practices by literary critics. For a view of both the inescapability and practical functioning of literary and artistic theory in traditional criticism, see M. H. Abrams, “What’s the Use of Theorizing about the Arts?” (1972, reprinted in Doing Things with Texts, 1989). Jonathan Culler’s Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction (1997) analyzes the issues and debates that cut across the boundaries of diverse poststructural theories. See also Richard Harland, Superstructuralism: The Philosophy of Structuralism and Post-Structuralism (1987); Anthony Easthope, British Poststructuralism since 1968 (1988). Anthologies that include important poststructural essays and selections: David Lodge, ed., Modern Criticism and Theory (1988); K. M. Newton, ed., 20th-Century Literary Theory (1988); Robert Con Davis and Ronald Schleifer, eds., Contemporary Literary Criticism (rev. 1989). The most inclusive collection, with extensive bibliographies, is Vincent Leitch, ed., The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism (2001). For discussions and critiques of poststructuralist theories and practices from diverse points of view: Fredric Jameson, Poststructuralism; or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991); John McGowan, Postmodernism and Its Critics (1991); Jonathan Arac and Barbara Johnson, eds., Consequences of Theory (1991); Dwight Eddin, ed., The Emperor Redressed: Critiquing Critical Theory (1995); James Battersby, Reason and the Nature of Texts (1996); Wendell V. Harris, ed., Beyond Structuralism (1996); Daphne Patai and Will H. Corral, eds., Theory’s Empire: An Anthology of Dissent (2005).
Abrams, M H, and Geoffrey G. Harpham. A Glossary of Literary Terms. Boston, Mass: Thomson Wadsworth, 1999.
Mambrol, Nasrullah. "Poststructuralism ." Literary Theory and Criticism 21 March 2016.
Mambrol, Nasrullah. "Structuralism ." Literary Theory and Criticism 20 March 2016.
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