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Some theoretical differences between structuralism and post-structuralism Is post-structuralism a continuation and development of structuralism or a form of rebellion against it? In one important sense it is the latter, since a very effective way of rebelling is to accuse your predecessors of not having the courage of their convictions. Thus post-structuralists accuse structuralists of not following through the implications of the views about language on which their intellectual system is based. As we saw, one of structuralism's characteristic views is the
What does it mean to live in an era of ‘posts’? At a time when ‘post-truth’ is on everyone’s lips, this volume seeks to uncover the logic of post-constructions – postmodernism, post-secularism, postfeminism, post-colonialism, post-capitalism, post-structuralism, post-humanism, post-tradition, post-Christian, post-Keynesian and post-ideology – across a wide array of contexts. It shows that ‘post’ does not simply mean ‘after.’ Although post-prefixes sometimes denote a particular periodization, especially in the case of mid-twentieth-century post-concepts, they more often convey critical dissociation from their root concept. In some cases, they even indicate a continuation of the root concept in an altered form. By surveying the range of meanings that post-prefixes convey, as well as how these meanings have changed over time and across multiple and shifting contexts, this volume sheds new light on how post-constructions work and on what purposes they serve. Moreover, by tracing them across the humanities and social sciences, the volume uncovers sometimes unexpected parallels and transfers between fields usually studied in isolation from each other.
Theory often eclipses the text, just as the moon's shadow obscures the sun in an eclipse, so that the text loses its own voice and begins to voice theory. This book provides summaries or descriptions of a number of important theoretical essays. It commences with an account of the 'liberal humanism' against which all newer critical approaches to literature, broadly speaking, define themselves. The book suggests a useful form of intensive reading, which breaks down the reading of a difficult chapter or article into five stages, as designated by the letters 'SQRRR': Survey, Question, Read, Recall, and Review. It explains the rise of English studies by indicating what higher education was like in England until the first quarter of the nineteenth century. The book talks about the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, Roland Barthes, and Jacques Derrida. It lists some differences and distinctions between structuralism and post-structuralism under the four headings: origins, tone and style, attitude to language, and project. Providing a clear example of deconstructive practice, the book then describes three stages of the deconstructive process: the verbal, the textual, and the linguistic. It includes information on some important characteristics of literary modernism practiced by various writers, psychoanalytic criticism, feminist criticism and queer theory. The book presents an example of Marxist criticism, and discusses the overlap between cultural materialism and new historicism, specific differences between conventional close reading and stylistics and insights on narratology. It covers the story of literary theory through ten key events.
In 1796 a German politico-philosophical manifesto proclaims the 'highest act of reason' as an 'aesthetic act'. The ways in which this transformation relates to the development of some of the major directions in modern philosophy is the focus of this book. The book focuses on the main accounts of the human subject and on the conceptions of art and language which emerge within the Kantian and post-Kantian history of aesthetics. Immanuel Kant's main work on aesthetics, the 'third Critique', the Critique of Judgement, forms part of his response to unresolved questions which emerge from his Critique of Pure Reason and Critique of Practical Reason. The early Romantics, who, after all, themselves established the term, can be characterized in a way which distinguishes them from later German Romanticism. The 'Oldest System Programme of German Idealism', is a manifesto for a new philosophy and exemplifies the spirit of early Idealism, not least with regard to mythology. The crucial question posed by the Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling of the System of Transcendental Idealism (STI) is how art relates to philosophy, a question which has recently reappeared in post-structuralism and in aspects of pragmatism. Despite his undoubted insights, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's insufficiency in relation to music is part of his more general problem with adequately theorising self-consciousness, and thus with his aesthetic theory. Friedrich Schleiermacher argues in the hermeneutics that interpretation of the meaning of Kunst is itself also an 'art'. The book concludes with a discussion on music, language, and Romantic thought.
Introduction Today, the term ‘post-structuralism’ designates a stage in the intellectual history of modern France. According to a familiar narrative, post-war French thought is divided up into a number of moments that can conveniently structure an American college course. The great success of existentialist ideas in the 1940s, propounded by figures like Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, who emphasized the free and acting subject, was followed by a ‘structuralist’ reaction, when Claude Lévi
within political economy fail to recognise the ideational realm as a sphere of agency. The chapter will argue that ideology enables this approach. First, however, it surveys the main forms of ideational analysis influential within political economy: constructivism, post-structuralism and neoGramscianism. Constructivism is an interpretivist approach. Its origins are in sociology; it became influential among political economists following John Ruggie’s work on the liberal norms embedded in the Bretton Woods institutions. Post-structuralism can also be classified as
What is postmodernism? What was modernism? As with structuralism and post-structuralism, there is a great deal of debate about how exactly modernism and postmodernism differ. The two concepts are of different vintage, ‘modernism’ being a long-standing category which is of crucial importance in the understanding of twentieth-century culture, whereas the term ‘postmodernism’, as is well known, has only become current since the 1980s. ‘Modernism’ is the name given to the movement which dominated the arts and culture of the first half of the twentieth century
competition in the vein of more conservative plotters such as John Grisham and Tom Clancy. Much of the film’s post-structural enigma lies in the fact that, as Reisz himself puts it, ‘The events – the violence, the betrayals – are largely off screen. The story is about the undercurrents, the things undisclosed – what seems is not always what is’. 13 Instead of outward facts and concrete evidence, we get endless verbal dissimulation
’s work titled Seurat’s Les Poseuses (Small Version) (1888–1975) chronicled the painting’s provenance, including a detailed description of each owner, their political affinities, and the type of transaction by which the work had changed hands. Through this documentation, the status of the painting as an asset was highlighted over its cultural value. For the curators to place Haacke’s institutional critique into an exhibition concerned with the influences of post-structuralism and psychoanalytic discourses on art was to interpret gender as a type of “institution.” It
than any relation to historical (identitarian) queers (ibid.: 16). We can see in this account the spirit of post-structuralism, of Butler and Bersani, but Menon’s most explicit debt is to another theorist: Alain Badiou and his critique of ethical systems based on the recognition of differences, such as those that predominate in contemporary multiculturalism. As Badiou (2001: 25, original italics) writes in his short polemic Ethics, ‘Infinite alterity is quite simply what there is’. Therefore ‘differences hold no interest for thought’ and ‘amount to nothing more than