poststructuralism

Poststructuralism and Deconstruction
解構主義

Concepts & Examples

Practice

Texts

Issues & Discussion

Relevant Links

Bibliographies

Under Construction

First examples: animations '"Mastioska"; "Tango"
Focus: poststructuralist view of language

I. Major Concepts of Poststructuralism: Some Post-Structural Assumptions (remote)
1. The play of signifiers: (It moves, it multiplies, it is material and exchangeable.)
The stable connection/unity of signifier and signified is challenged. More emphasis is put on the signifier, and its play. critique of meaning

2. Anti-Humanism critique of human subject
The notion of the subject as a unity of consciousness and agent has been challenged. e.g.

Foucault in The Order of Things traces the emergence of "Man" in modernity and the end of Man in the postmodern times.
Foucault's discussion of the "author" as a discursive unit; the splitting of subject into the subject of enunciation and the enunciated subject.
Lacan: the subject split since the mirror stage, by desire

3. De-Totalization, De-Doxification: of History and Traditional Philosophy (the former's linear causality; as forms of totalization), Doxa (common sense) and Truth

4. Self-Reflexivity & Concerns with Representation : Theory and practice are no longer separable. Theories become more self-reflexive.

Major Theorists:

Early influences:Mikhail Bahktin
(Difference between Bahktin and Barthes in their view of referentiality)
Bahktin: The relation between art and reality is defined by chronotope. Chronotope is the process of assimilating real time and space; it is the historical time and space artistically shaped and expressed in art.
Barthes: In the most realistic novel, the referent has no "reality." What we called "real" is never more than a code of representation: it is never a code of execution: the novelistic real is not operable.
Roland Barthes
Michelle Foucault
Barthes and Foucault (An Outline by Allison Lin)

Theorists on Postmodernism

II. Major Concepts of Derridian Deconstruction:

1. Lily Huang (outline of an introd); 2. "Differance" outline: 1. Kate Liu; 2. Kevin Chen

    -- language as a system of difference, the transcendental signified
    --logocentrism, phonocentrism, phalogocentrism
    --binary opposition and supplement
       *While structualists had treated binary oppositions as stable terms in a formal structure, Derrida sees
         them as organized in unstable disequilibrium (see Handout p. 89).
    --diffrance: 1. To defer, 2. To differ

II. Practice:

    A. deconstruct traditional texts
        1. reverse the binary hierarchy (finding its supplementation)'textbook 81-82
            e.g. "Young Goodman Brown"; "Prufrock" Paradise Lost
        2. find out a text's gap, or critical difference (contradictions in a text), and indeterminacy
            e. g. Wordsworth's "Afterthought" and "A Slumber did my Spirit Seal", Huckleberry Finn, Billy Budd
            indeterminacy: Scarlet Letter, "Purloined Letter"
        3. the textual unconscious (ideology)
            "Eveline" ; "Fire Sermon" from The Waste Land
    B. explain intertextuality in postmodern texts

C. discuss Derrida's ideas as they are illustrated in a text: "Deconstructing Jeffefries." ("Snowed Up")