Post-structuralism is a fuller working out of the implications of structuralism. Discuss
V. S. Seturaman assets: The later psycho-analysis and later Marxism have moved in the direction of post-structuralism in as much as these discipline too have tried to shift from the signified to the signifier. In fact Lacan and Macherey in their own way have made reading not just a matter of consumption as creation, performation.
Lacan says that the signifier should be set free of the signified. The unconscious is the whole structure of language and in Lancan's scheme psycho-analysis becomes rhetorical exegesis of the unconscious through the signifier. Thus "The Purloined Letter' is for Lacan 'a symbolic repetition compulsion. The story is seen as an allegory of the supremacy of the signifier over the subjects it brings into being.
Althusser, the Marxist structuralist, started questioning the habit of seeing ideology in terms of illusions versus reality, a system of ideas marking the real material structure ideology to him was the material system of social practices. Macherey influenced by Althusser came to concentrate on the historical condition of the production of a work of art and therefore he did not believe in its organic form or unity or harmony. Hence all criticism for him is a commentary in the sense that we make the meanings and we don't discover anything that is there hidden.
Derrida may be considered the founder to Deconstractive criticism. His remarkably influential essay on every subject pertaining to human sciences have justly made him a difficult writer. He has written on philosophy examining the contribution of Husserl, Kant, Nietzsche, Heidegger. He has written on literature (Rousseau, Mallarme), on anthropology (Levi-Strauss) on Psychology and psychoanalysis (Freud] Lacan), on linguistics and language philosophy (Saussure, Austin, Searle etc.)
As for his impact on literary criticism it must be assessed in terms of the radical ideas he brought to our ways of reading texts and comprehending textual significance. His interest in and charting a tracking 'Priori' modes or grounds of textual organization and signification, and his performance' actually brought about a change in our ways of thinkin thinking and understanding.
He called into question the whole gamut of assumptions philosophical and literary in western culture. His essay structuralism. He argues that there is no determinate signified and hence he takes to its logical extreme the idea of free play. He contends that there is a deferring of reference with regard to any signifier. Paul de Man, Hills Miller and Harold Bloom call themselves deconstructionists.
Paul de man brings out in his criticism the paradoxical discrepancies that characterise and are constitutive of literary language in general. Hills Miller starts with thesis that we can't afford the reduce a text to a correct or single unified meaning or interpretation and restrain the free play of its elements. Interpretation is a reciprocal act, the text and the interpreter together contribute to the making of the meaning His strategy is to choose certain key wards and trace their meaning back to their etymological roots.
There is a semantic dissemination, a deracinating of the text resulting in multiple meanings. For bloom every text and every poet is influenced by his precursor poet. He uses the term misprision (which means mistaking/ misreading and misinterpretation) and all reading, according to him, is a misreading which must occur between one poet and another and between the critic and his text.
The later poet misreads the precursor poet and the critic misinterprets the text. It is difficult to class bloom with Derrida and other Deconstructionists since he seems to attach some importance to psychic biography and history.
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- Discuss Goldsmith's View of Sentimental Comedy
- Give an estimate of Goldsmith as a dramatist
- Contribution of Goldsmith as a Dramatist
