In philosophy,deconstruction is a loosely-defined set of approaches to understanding the relationship between text and meaning. The concept of deconstruction was introduced by the philosopher Jacques Derrida,who described it as a turn away from Platonism's ideas of "true" forms and essences which are valued above appearances.
Post-structuralism is a philosophical movement that questions the objectivity or stability of the various interpretive structures that are posited by structuralism and considers them to be constituted by broader systems of power. Although post-structuralists all present different critiques of structuralism,common themes among them include the rejection of the self-sufficiency of structuralism,as well as an interrogation of the binary oppositions that constitute its structures. Accordingly,post-structuralism discards the idea of interpreting media within pre-established,socially constructed structures.
Structuralism is an intellectual current and methodological approach,primarily in the social sciences,that interprets elements of human culture by way of their relationship to a broader system. It works to uncover the structural patterns that underlie all the things that humans do,think,perceive,and feel.
Semiotic literary criticism,also called literary semiotics,is the approach to literary criticism informed by the theory of signs or semiotics. Semiotics,tied closely to the structuralism pioneered by Ferdinand de Saussure,was extremely influential in the development of literary theory out of the formalist approaches of the early twentieth century.
Literary theory is the systematic study of the nature of literature and of the methods for literary analysis. Since the 19th century,literary scholarship includes literary theory and considerations of intellectual history,moral philosophy,social philosophy,and interdisciplinary themes relevant to how people interpret meaning. In the humanities in modern academia,the latter style of literary scholarship is an offshoot of post-structuralism. Consequently,the word theory became an umbrella term for scholarly approaches to reading texts,some of which are informed by strands of semiotics,cultural studies,philosophy of language,and continental philosophy,often witnessed within Western canon along with some postmodernist theory.
A genre of arts criticism,literary criticism or literary studies is the study,evaluation,and interpretation of literature. Modern literary criticism is often influenced by literary theory,which is the philosophical analysis of literature's goals and methods. Although the two activities are closely related,literary critics are not always,and have not always been,theorists.
Jacques Derrida was a French philosopher. He developed the philosophy of deconstruction,which he utilized in a number of his texts,and which was developed through close readings of the linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure and Husserlian and Heideggerian phenomenology. He is one of the major figures associated with post-structuralism and postmodern philosophy although he distanced himself from post-structuralism and disowned the word "postmodernity".
Roland Gérard Barthes was a French literary theorist,essayist,philosopher,critic,and semiotician. His work engaged in the analysis of a variety of sign systems,mainly derived from Western popular culture. His ideas explored a diverse range of fields and influenced the development of many schools of theory,including structuralism,anthropology,literary theory,and post-structuralism.
Russian formalism was a school of literary theory in Russia from the 1910s to the 1930s. It includes the work of a number of highly influential Russian and Soviet scholars such as Viktor Shklovsky,Yuri Tynianov,Vladimir Propp,Boris Eichenbaum,Roman Jakobson,Boris Tomashevsky,Grigory Gukovsky who revolutionised literary criticism between 1914 and the 1930s by establishing the specificity and autonomy of poetic language and literature. Russian formalism exerted a major influence on thinkers like Mikhail Bakhtin and Juri Lotman,and on structuralism as a whole. The movement's members had a relevant influence on modern literary criticism,as it developed in the structuralist and post-structuralist periods. Under Stalin it became a pejorative term for elitist art.
Narratology is the study of narrative and narrative structure and the ways that these affect human perception. The term is an anglicisation of French narratologie,coined by Tzvetan Todorov. Its theoretical lineage is traceable to Aristotle (Poetics) but modern narratology is agreed to have begun with the Russian formalists,particularly Vladimir Propp,and Mikhail Bakhtin's theories of heteroglossia,dialogism,and the chronotope first presented in The Dialogic Imagination (1975).
"Logocentrism" is a term coined by the German philosopher Ludwig Klages in the early 1900s. It refers to the tradition of Western science and philosophy that regards words and language as a fundamental expression of an external reality. It holds the logos as epistemologically superior and that there is an original,irreducible object which the logos represent. According to logocentrism,the logos is the ideal representation of the Platonic ideal.
A binary opposition is a pair of related terms or concepts that are opposite in meaning. Binary opposition is the system of language and/or thought by which two theoretical opposites are strictly defined and set off against one another. It is the contrast between two mutually exclusive terms,such as on and off,up and down,left and right. Binary opposition is an important concept of structuralism,which sees such distinctions as fundamental to all language and thought. In structuralism,a binary opposition is seen as a fundamental organizer of human philosophy,culture,and language.
"The Death of the Author" is a 1967 essay by the French literary critic and theorist Roland Barthes (1915–1980). Barthes' essay argues against traditional literary criticism's practice of relying on the intentions and biography of an author to definitively explain the "ultimate meaning" of a text. Instead,the essay emphasizes the primacy of each individual reader's interpretation of the work over any "definitive" meaning intended by the author,a process in which subtle or unnoticed characteristics may be drawn out for new insight. The essay's first English-language publication was in the American journal Aspen,no. 5–6 in 1967;the French debut was in the magazine Manteia,no. 5 (1968). The essay later appeared in an anthology of Barthes' essays,Image-Music-Text (1977),a book that also included his "From Work to Text".
Gérard Genette was a French literary theorist,associated in particular with the structuralist movement and with figures such as Roland Barthes and Claude Lévi-Strauss,from whom he adapted the concept of bricolage.
"Structure,Sign,and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences" was a lecture presented at Johns Hopkins University on 21 October 1966 by philosopher Jacques Derrida. The lecture was then published in 1967 as chapter ten of Writing and Difference.
Barbara Ellen Johnson was an American literary critic and translator,born in Boston. She was a Professor of English and Comparative Literature and the Fredric Wertham Professor of Law and Psychiatry in Society at Harvard University. Her scholarship incorporated a variety of structuralist and poststructuralist perspectives—including deconstruction,Lacanian psychoanalysis,and feminist theory—into a critical,interdisciplinary study of literature. As a scholar,teacher,and translator,Johnson helped make the theories of French philosopher Jacques Derrida accessible to English-speaking audiences in the United States at a time when they had just begun to gain recognition in France. Accordingly,she is often associated with the "Yale School" of academic literary criticism.
Derek Attridge FBA is a South African-born British academic in the field of English literature. He is Emeritus Professor of English and Related Literature at the University of York,having retired from the university in 2016,and is a Fellow of the British Academy. Attridge undertakes research in South African literature,James Joyce,modern fiction,deconstruction and literary theory and the history and performance of poetry. He is the author or editor of thirty books,and has published eighty articles in essay collections and a similar number in journals. He has held a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Leverhulme Research Professorship,and Fellowships at the National Humanities Center,the Bogliasco Foundation,the Camargo Foundation,and The Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study,the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies,and All Souls and St. Catherine's Colleges,Oxford. Among the visiting positions he has held have been professorships at the American University of Cairo,the University of Sassari,the University of Cape Town,Northwestern University,Wellesley College,and the University of Queensland.
Perry Meisel is an American writer and former Professor of English at New York University. He taught at New York University for over forty years prior to his retirement in 2016 and has written on literature,music,psychoanalysis,theory,and culture since the 1970s. His articles have appeared in The Village Voice,The New York Times Book Review,Partisan Review,October,The Nation,The Atlantic,and many other publications. His books include The Myth of Popular Culture from Dante to Dylan,The Literary Freud,The Cowboy and the Dandy,The Myth of the Modern,The Absent Father,and Thomas Hardy:The Return of the Repressed. He is co-editor,with Haun Saussy,of Ferdinand de Saussure's Course in General Linguistics,and co-editor,with Walter Kendrick,of Bloomsbury/Freud:The Letters of James and Alix Strachey,1924–25. He is also editor of Freud:A Collection of Critical Essays. He received his B.A.,M. Phil,and Ph.D. from Yale.
In literary theory,literariness is the organisation of language which through special linguistic and formal properties distinguishes literary texts from non-literary texts. The defining features of a literary work do not reside in extraliterary conditions such as history or sociocultural phenomena under which a literary text might have been created,but in the form of the language that is used. Thus,literariness is defined as being the feature that makes a given work a literary work. It distinguishes a literary work from ordinary texts by using certain artistic devices such as metre,rhyme,and other patterns of sound and repetition.
Structuralist Poetics:Structuralism,Linguistics and the Study of Literature is a 1975 book of critical literary theory by the critic Jonathan Culler. First published by Routledge &Kegan Paul,it won the James Russell Lowell Prize from the Modern Language Association of America in 1976 for an outstanding book of criticism. It is hailed as the "most thorough and influential account" in the English-speaking world of the school of structuralism as a critical theory of literature.
