Deconstruction is any of 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. Since the 1980s,these proposals of language's fluidity instead of being ideally static and discernible have inspired a range of studies in the humanities,including the disciplines of law,anthropology,historiography,linguistics,sociolinguistics,psychoanalysis,LGBT studies,and feminism. Deconstruction also inspired deconstructivism in architecture and remains important within art,music,and literary criticism.
Postmodernism is an intellectual stance or mode of discourse characterized by skepticism toward the "grand narratives" of modernism;rejection of epistemic (scientific) certainty or the stability of meaning;and sensitivity to the role of ideology in maintaining political power. Claims to objectivity are dismissed as naïve realism,with attention drawn to the conditional nature of knowledge claims within particular historical,political,and cultural discourses. The postmodern outlook is characterized by self-referentiality,epistemological relativism,moral relativism,pluralism,irony,irreverence,and eclecticism;it rejects the "universal validity" of binary oppositions,stable identity,hierarchy,and categorization.
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.
Literary criticism is the study,a genre of arts criticism,evaluation,and interpretation of literature. Modern literary criticism is often influenced by literary theory,which is the philosophical discussion of literature's goals and methods. Though the two activities are closely related,literary critics are not always,and have not always been,theorists.
Jacques Derrida was an Algerian-born French philosopher. He developed the philosophy of deconstruction,which he utilized in numerous 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.
Narratology is the study of narrative and narrative structure and the ways that these affect human perception. It 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's 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's essays,Image-Music-Text (1977),a book that also included his "From Work to Text".
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.
Poetics is the theory of structure,form,and discourse within literature,and,in particular,within poetry.
Fiction theory is a discipline that applies possible world theory to literature. Fiction theory scholars and critics have articulated various theses rooted in Saul Kripke's application of modal logic to semantics. Drawing on concepts found in possible world theory,theorists of fiction study the relationships between textual worlds and the world outside the text. The overarching idea in fiction theory is that the relationships between the imaginary worlds of fiction and the actual world in which we live are complicated,and that one ought not dismiss fiction as simply stories that are not "true". Theorists of fiction pose challenging questions about,and offer constructive ways of exploring,the often complex relations between the worlds of fiction and the "real" world in which we live.
In narratology,fabula equates to the thematic content of a narrative and syuzhet ) equates to the chronological structure of the events within the narrative. Vladimir Propp and Viktor Shklovsky originated the terminology as part of the Russian Formalism movement in the early 20th century. Narratologists have described fabula as "the raw material of a story",and syuzhet as "the way a story is organized".
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.
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.
