Post-structuralism appeared in the late 1960s as a reaction against structuralism.

Post-structuralism tries to reduce the scientific claims/pretensions of structuralism. If

structuralism was heroic in its desire to master the world of man-made signs, post-structuralism
is comic and antiheroic in its refusal to take such claims seriously. Post-structuralist thought has
discovered the essentially unstable nature of signification. The sign is not so much a unit with
two sides, as a momentary 'fix' between two moving layers.

Post-Structuralism and Literature

By questioning the methods used to build knowledge (science, religion, language) → traditional
literary notions = changed/distorted/thrown into freeplay.
Narrative
“The narrative is a fiction that locks readers into interpreting text in a single, chronological
manner that does not reflect our experiences. Postmodern texts may not adhere to traditional
notions of narrative.”
Moreover, grand narratives are resisted:
- the belief that through science the human race will improve is questioned (e.g. Huxley).
- metaphysics is questioned.
- postmodern knowledge building is determined, contextual, local, situated, slippery, and self-
critical (i.e. it questions itself and its role).
- post-structural work is self-critical and playful → post-structural critics even look for ways
texts contradict themselves..
Author
- The author is displaced as absolute author(ity)
- the reader plays a role in interpreting the text and developing meaning
- In “The Death of the Author,” (Roland Barthes) → the death of the author shatters
Modernist notions of authority and knowledge building;
- once the author is dead and the Modernist idea of singular narrative (and thus authority) is
overturned, texts become plural, and the interpretation of texts becomes a collaborative
process between author and audience: “...a text is made of multiple writings, drawn from
many cultures and entering into mutual relations of dialogue...but there is one place
where this multiplicity is focused and that place is the reader” (148).
- Barthes empowers the reader: “Classical criticism has never paid any attention to the
reader...the writer is the only person in literature…it is necessary to overthrow the myth:
the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author” (148).

Post-structuralism and Deconstruction

(from Peter Barry – Beginning Theory)

Among the differences between structuralism and post-structuralism there are:

1. Origins
Structuralism derives ultimately from linguistics and inherits its confidently scientific
outlook; it believes in method, system and reason as being able to establish reliable truths.
Post-structuralism derives ultimately from philosophy which emphasises the difficulty of
achieving secure knowledge about things. This point of view belongs to Nietszche who
 stated: "There are no facts, only interpretations". Post-structuralism inherits this habit of
scepticism, and intensifies it. It regards any confidence in the scientific method as naïve, and
even derives a certain intellectual pleasure from knowing for certain that we can't know
anything for certain.
2. Tone and style
Structuralist writing tends towards abstraction and generalisation: it aims for a detached,
'scientific coolness' of tone. The style is neutral and anonymous, as is typical of scientific
writing.
Post-structuralist writing tends to be much more emotive. Often the tone is urgent and
euphoric, and the style flamboyant and self-consciously showy. Titles may contain puns and
allusions, and often the central line of the argument is based on a pun or a word-play of some
kind.
3. Attitude to language
Structuralists accept that the world is constructed through language, in the sense that we do
not have access to reality other than through the linguistic medium.
Post-structuralism is much more fundamentalist in insisting upon the consequences of the
view that, in effect, reality itself is textual. Post-structuralism develops what threaten to
become terminal anxieties about the possibility of achieving any knowledge through
language. The verbal sign in its view is constantly floating free of the concept it is supposed
to designate. Thus, the post-structuralist's way of speaking about language involves a rather
obsessive imagery based on liquids - signs float free of what they designate, meanings are
fluid, and subject to constant 'slippage'. The meanings words have can never be hundred per
cent pure. Thus, words are always 'contaminated' by their opposites - you can't define night
without reference to day, or good without reference to evil.
4. Project - the fundamental aims of each movement.
Structuralism questions our way of structuring and categorising 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 distrusts 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, whereby
what we may think of as the individual is really a product of social and linguistic forces -
that is not an essence at all, merely a 'tissue of textualities'.

Practical differences
Post-structuralism often claims that it is more an attitude of mind than a practical method
of criticism. The post-structuralist literary critic is engaged in the task of 'deconstructing' the text.
This process is given the name 'deconstruction', which can be roughly defined as applied post-
structuralism. It is often referred to as 'reading the text against itself' with the purpose of
'knowing the text as it cannot know itself'.
Deconstruction is not synonymous with 'destruction'. It is in fact much closer to the
original meaning of the word 'analysis' which etymologically means 'to undo'… the
deconstruction of a text does not proceed by random doubt or arbitrary subversion, but by the
careful teasing out of warring forces of signification within the text. (Johnson, The Critical
Difference)

In order to show textual unity and coherence structuralist critics seeks: parallels/echoes,
balances, reflections/repetitions, symmetry, contrasts, patterns. Poststructuralist critics try to
show textual disunity and seek: contradictions/paradoxes, shifts/breaks in tone, viewpoint, tense,
time, person, attitude, conflicts, absences/omissions, aporia (an impasse designating a kind of
knot in the text which cannot be unravelled or solved because what is said is self-contradictory).
The two figures mostly associated with this emergence are Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida.
Barthes started as a structuralist but his crucial essay was 'The Death of the Author' turns him
from structuralism to post-structuralism. The difference between his article 'The Structural
Analysis of Narrative' (1966) and the book 'The Pleasure of the Text' is a shift of attention from
the text seen as something produced by the author to the text seen as something produced by the
reader. Jacques Derrida's lecture 'Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human
Sciences' (1966) marks the starting point of post-structuralism. He sees in modern time a
particular intellectual event which constitutes a radical break from past ways of thought, loosely
associating this break with the philosophy of Nietszche and Heidegger and the psychoanalysis of
Freud. The event concerns the decentring of our intellectual universe. If we have the courage we
will enter this new Nietszchean universe, where there are no guaranteed facts, only
interpretations, none of which has the stamp of authority upon it, since there is no longer any
authorative centre to which to appeal for validation of our interpretation.

The writer writes in a language and in a logic whose proper systems, laws, and life his discourse
by definition cannot dominate absolutely. He uses them by only letting himself, after a fashion
and up to a point, be governed by the system. And the reading must always aim at a certain
relationship, unperceived by the writer, between what he commands and what he does not
command of the patterns of the language that he uses. This relationship is not a certain
quantitative distribution of shadow and light, of weakness or of force but a signifying structure
that critical reading should produce. (Derrida, Of Grammatology)

“I fell in love – that is the only expression I can think of – at once, and am still at the mercy of
words, though sometimes now, knowing a little of their behaviour very well, I think I can
influence them slightly and have even learnt to beat them now and then, which they appear to
enjoy.” (Thomas, Jones, 2003: XVI)

Questions:
 How is language thrown into freeplay or questioned in the work?
 How does the work undermine or contradict generally accepted truths?
 How does the author (or a character) omit, change, or reconstruct memory and identity?
 How does a work fulfil or move outside the established conventions of its genre?
 How does the work deal with the separation between writer, work, and reader?
 What is left out of the text that if included might undermine the goal of the work?
 If we changed the point of view of the text - say from one character to another, or
multiple characters - how would the story change? Whose story is not told in the text?
Who is left out and why might the author have omitted this character's tale?

Theorists

 Jacques Derrida - "Structure Sign and Play in the Discourse of Human Sciences," 1966;
Of Grammatology, 1967; "Signature Even Context," 1972
 Roland Barthes - "The Death of the Author," 1967
 Deleuze and Guattari - "Rhizome," 1976
 Jean-François Lyotard - The Postmodern Condition, 1979
 Michele Foucault - The Foucault Reader, 1984