- First paper and conclusion
( addressedto my teacher Vicente Forés)
- Information from the web:
- Structuralism/Poststructuralism
- Deconstruction: some assumptions
- Essays in Postmodern Culture
- Personal commentary
Structuralism/Poststructuralism
Taken from: http://www.colorado.edu/English/ENGL2012Klages/1derrida.html
Structuralism is appealing to some critics because it adds a certain
objectivity, a SCIENTIFIC objectivity, to the realm of literary studies
(which have often been criticized as purely subjective/impressionistic).
This scientific objectivity is achieved by subordinating "parole" to "langue;"
actual usage is abandoned in favor of studying the structure of a system
in the abstract. Thus structuralist readings ignore the specificity of
actual texts and treat them as if they were like the patterns produced
by iron filings moved by magnetic force--the result of some impersonal
force or power, not the result of human effort.
In structuralism, the individuality of the text disappears in favor
of looking at patterns, systems, and structures. Some structuralists (and
a related school of critics, called the Russian Formalists) propose that
ALL narratives can be charted as variations on certain basic universal
narrative patterns.
In this way of looking at narratives, the author is canceled out, since
the text is a function of a system, not of an individual. The Romantic
humanist model holds that the author is the origin of the text, its creator,
and hence is the starting point or progenitor of the text. Structuralism
argues that any piece of writing, or any signifying system, has no origin,
and that authors merely inhabit pre-existing structures (langue) that enable
them to make any particular sentence (or story)--any parole. Hence the
idea that "language speaks us," rather than that we speak language. We
don't originate language; we inhabit a structure that enables us to speak;
what we (mis)perceive as our originality is simply our recombination of
some of the elements in the pre-existing system. Hence every text, and
every sentence we speak or write, is made up of the "already written."
By focusing on the system itself, in a synchronic analysis, structuralists cancel out history. Most insist, as Levi-Strauss does, that structures are universal, therefore timeless. Structuralists can't account for change or development; they are uninterested, for example, in how literary forms may have changed over time. They are not interested in a text's production or reception/consumption, but only in the structures that shape it.
In erasing the author, the individual text, the reader, and history, structuralism represented a major challenge to what we now call the "liberal humanist" tradition in literary criticism.
The HUMANIST model presupposed:
1.) That there is a real world out there that we can understand with our rational minds.
2.) That language is capable of (more or less) accurately depicting
that real world..
3.) That language is a product of the individual writer's mind or free will, meaning that we determine what we say, and what we mean when we say it; that language thus expresses the essence of our individual beings (and that there is such a thing as an essential unique individual "self").
4.) the SELF--also known as the "subject," since that's how we represent
the idea of a self in language, by saying I, which is the subject of a
sentence--or the individual (or the mind or the free will) is the center
of all meaning and truth; words mean what I say they mean, and truth is
what I perceive as truth. I create my own sentences out of my own individual
experiences and need for individual expression.
The STRUCTURALIST model argues
1.) that the structure of language itself produces "reality"--that we can think only through language, and therefore our perceptions of reality are all framed by and determined by the structure of language.
2.) That language speaks us; that the source of meaning is not an individual's experience or being, but the sets of oppositions and operations, the signs and grammars that govern language. Meaning doesn't come from individuals, but from the system that governs what any individual can do within it.
3.) Rather than seeing the individual as the center of meaning, structuralism places THE STRUCTURE at the center--it's the structure that originates or produces meaning, not the individual self. Language in particular is the center of self and meaning; I can only say "I" because I inhabit a system of language in which the position of subject is marked by the first personal pronoun, hence my identity is the product of the linguistic system I occupy.
This is also where deconstruction starts to come in. The leading figure in deconstruction, Jacques Derrida, looks at philosophy (Western metaphysics) to see that any system necessarily posits a CENTER, a point from which everything comes, and to which everything refers or returns. Sometimes it's God, sometimes it's the human self, the mind, sometimes it's the unconscious, depending on what philosophical system (or set of beliefs) one is talking about.
There are two key points to the idea of deconstruction. First is that we're still going to look at systems or structures, rather than at individual concrete practices, and that all systems or structures have a CENTER, the point of origin, the thing that created the system in the first place. Second is that all systems or structures are created of binary pairs or oppositions, of two terms placed in some sort of relation to each.
Derrida says that such systems are always built of the basic units structuralism analyzes--the binary opposition or pair--and that within these systems one part of that binary pair is always more important than the other, that one term is "marked" as positive and the other as negative. Hence in the binary pair good/evil, good is what Western philosophy values, and evil is subordinated to good. Derrida argues that all binary pairs work this way--light/dark, masculine/feminine, right/left; in Western culture, the first term is always valued over the second.
In his most famous work, Of Grammatology, Derrida looks particularly
at the opposition speech/writing, saying that speech is always seen as
more important than writing. This may not be as self-evident as the example
of good/evil, but it's true in terms of linguistic theories, where speech
is posited as the first or primary form of language, and writing is just
the transcription of speech. Derrida says speech gets privileged because
speech is associated with presence--for there to be spoken language, somebody
has to be there to be speaking.
No, he doesn't take into account tape recordings and things like that.
Remember, a lot of what these guys are talking about has roots in philosophic
and linguistic traditions that predate modern technology--so that Derrida
is responding to an opposition (speech/writing) that Plato set up, long
before there were tape recorders. Just like poor old Levi-Strauss talks
about how, in order to map all the dimensions of a myth, he'd have to have
"punch cards and an IBM machine," when all he'd need now is a home computer.
Anyway, the idea is that the spoken word guarantees the existence of somebody doing the speaking--thus it reinforces all those great humanist ideas, like that there's a real self that is the origin of what's being said. Derrida calls this idea of the self that has to be there to speak part of the metaphysics of PRESENCE; the idea of being, or presence, is central to all systems of Western philosophy, from Plato through Descartes (up to Derrida himself). Presence is part of a binary opposition presence/absence, in which presence is always favored over absence. Speech gets associated with presence, and both are favored over writing and absence; this privileging of speech and presence is what Derrida calls LOGOCENTRISM.
You might think here about the Biblical phrase "Let there be light" as an example. The statement insures that there is a God (the thing doing the speaking), and that God is present (because speech=presence); the present God is the origin of all things (because God creates the world by speaking), and what God creates is binary oppositions (starting with light/dark). You might also think about other binary oppositions or pairs, including being/nothingness, reason/madness, word/silence, culture/nature, mind/body. Each term has meaning only in reference to the other (light is what is not dark, and vice-versa), just as, in Saussure's view, signifiers only have meaning--or negative value--in relation to other signifiers. These binary pairs are the "structures," or fundamental opposing ideas, that Derrida is concerned with in Western philosophy.
Because of the favoring of presence over absence, speech is favored over writing (and, as we'll see with Freud, masculine is favored over feminine because the penis is defined as a presence, whereas the female genitals are defined as absence).
It's because of this favoring of presence over absence that every system (I'm referring here mostly to philosophical systems, but the idea works for signifying systems as well) posits a CENTER, a place from which the whole system comes, and which guarantees its meaning--this center guarantees being as presence. Think of your entire self as a kind of system--everything you do, think, feel, etc. is part of that system. At the core or center of your mental and physical life is a notion of SELF, of an "I", of an identity that is stable and unified and coherent, the part of you that knows who you mean when you say "I". This core self or "I" is thus the CENTER of the "system", the "langue" of your being, and every other part of you (each individual act) is part of the "parole". The "I" is the origin of all you say and do, and it guarantees the idea of your presence, your being.
Western thought has a whole bunch of terms that serve as centers to systems --being, essence, substance, truth, form, consciousness, man, god, etc. What Derrida tells us is that each of these terms designating the center of a system serves two purposes: it's the thing that created the system, that originated it and guarantees that all the parts of the system interrelate, and it's also something beyond the system, not governed by the rules of the system. This is what he talks about as a "scandal" discovered by Levi-Strauss in Levi-Strauss's thoughts about kinship systems. (This will be covered in detail in the next lecture).
What Derrida does is to look at how a binary opposition--the fundamental unit of the structures or systems we've been looking at, and of the philosophical systems he refers to--functions within a system. He points out that a binary opposition is algebraic (a=~b, a equals not-b), and that two terms can't exist without reference to the other--light (as presence) is defined as the absence of darkness, goodness the absence of evil, etc. He doesn't seek to reverse the hierarchies implied in binary pairs--to make evil favored over good, unconscious over consciousness, feminine over masculine. Rather, deconstruction wants to erase the boundaries (the slash) between oppositions, hence to show that the values and order implied by the opposition are also not rigid.
Here's the basic method of deconstruction: find a binary opposition. Show how each term, rather than being polar opposite of its paired term, is actually part of it. Then the structure or opposition which kept them apart collapses, as we see with the terms nature and culture in Derrida's essay. Ultimately, you can't tell which is which, and the idea of binary opposites loses meaning, or is put into "play" (more on this in the next lecture). This method is called "Deconstruction" because it is a combination of construction/destruction--the idea is that you don't simply construct new system of binaries, with the previously subordinated term on top, nor do you destroy the old system--rather, you deconstruct the old system by showing how its basic units of structuration (binary pairs and the rules for their combination) contradict their own logic.
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Last revision: September 17, 1997
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Deconstruction: Some Assumptions
Taken from: http://www.brocku.ca/english/courses/4F70/deconstruction.html
ENGL 4F70, Contemporary Literary Theory, Brock University
Copyright 1996 by John Lye. This text may be freely used, with attribution,
for non-profit purposes.
As are all of my posts for this course, this document is open to change.
If you have any suggestions (additions, qualifications, arguments), mail
me.
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Derrida on the impossibility of a genuinely rigorous deconstruction (from "Psyche: Invention of the Other", 1984):
I would say that deconstruction loses nothing from admitting that it
is impossible; also that those who would rush to delight in that admission
lose nothing from having to wait. For a deconstructive operation possibility
would rather be a danger, the danger of becoming an available set of rule-governed
procedures, methods, accessible practices. The interest of deconstruction,
of such force and desire as it may have, is a certain experience of the
impossible....
Deconstruction is inventive or it is nothing at all; it does not settle
for methodological procedures, it opens up a passageway, it marches ahead
and marks a trail; its writing is not only performative, it produces rules
-- other conventions -- for new performativities and never installs itself
in the theoretical assurance of a simple opposition between performative
and constative. Its process involves an affirmation, this latter being
linked to the coming [venir] in event, advent, invention.
A remark, from a commentator:
We now know -- or have no excuse for not knowing -- that deconstruction
is not a technique or a method, and hence that there is no question of
"applying" it. We know that it is not a moment of carnival or liberation,
but a moment of the deepest concern with limits. We know that it is not
a hymn to indeterminacy, or a life-imprisonment within language, or a denial
of history: reference, mimesis, context, historicity, are among the most
repeatedly emphasized and carefully scrutinized topics in Derrida's wri
ting. And we know -- though this myth perhaps dies hardest of all -- that
the ethical and the political are not avoided by deconstruction, but are
implicated at every step.
Attridge, Derek, "Singularities, Responsibilities: Derrida, Deconstruction
and Literary Criticism" in Critical Encoiunters: Reference and Responsibility
in Deconstructive Writing ed. Cathy Caruth and Deborah Esch, pp 109-110
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Deconstruction is a poststructuralist theory, based largely but not exclusively on the writings of the Paris-based Jacques Derrida. It is in the first instance a philosophical theory and a theory directed towards the (re)reading of philosophical writings. Its impact on literature, mediated in North America largely through the influences of theorists at Yale University, is based in part on the fact that deconstruction sees all writing as a complex historical, cultural process rooted in the relations of texts to each other and in the institutions and conventions of writing, in part on the sophistication and intensity of its sense that human knowledge is not as controllable or as cogent as Western thought would have it and that language operates in subtle and often contradictory ways, so that certainty will always elude us.
Structuralist groundworks
Reality as we understand it is constructed of certain deep structural
principles or organizations which may be configured differently on the
level of experienced life, as we both operate and interpet them differently.
Language, for instance, is compose of basic resources (langue) from which
individual instances of its use are drawn (parole); cultures are formed
through basic relations of economic production (the Marxist conception
of the 'base'), but these may appear differently as cultures (economies,
in the economic and more general sense) configure their ideas and arrangements
(the 'superstructure'). The idea is that there are basic structures which
are operationalized according to certain transformative rules in relation
to the particulars of specific situations.
There is no unmediated knowledge of 'reality': knowledge is symbolic;
what we 'know' are signs; signs gain their meaning from their distinction
from other signs. Therefore there is no knowledge of 'reality', but only
of symbolized, constructed experience. Our 'knowing of our experience'
is itself then mediated knowing, which is the only thing knowing can be.
There is no 'pure' knowledge of reality except, as the early theorist of
semiotics Charles Sanders Pierce suggests, at an instantaneous and inarticulable
level: one can, Pierce says, experience, but not know, reality-in-itself.
This is not to say that this experience of the real is not real; it is:
we live in a real world. But we live particularly in our codification,
our system of signs. If we cannot translate any experience into symbolic
form then we cannot 'know' it in a way that is useful to us; if we do know,
then our knowledge is only knowledge through our codes and our signifying
systems--that is, mediated knowledge. (as when we might experience an earthquake
without immediately knowing what it is, and so for a moment experience
only something like disoriented panic).
All texts are mediated (are only the process of mediation), in many ways: they are mediated by language, they are mediated by cultural systems, including ideologies and symbols, they are mediated by the conventions of genres, they are mediated by the world of intertextuality which is textuality's only true home, they are mediated by the structure of ideas and practices which we call reading (there is no 'pure reading', there is only reading according to some tradition, for some purpose). Texts are mediated in their construction, in their communication, and in their reception. Texts cannot, by definition, simply transfer an author's ideas.
Our mediated knowledge works as all signs systems work, not by identification but by differences and through codes.
Deconstruction assumptions
In deconstruction the basic structuralist principle of difference
is located ontologically as well as semiotically: at the very point of
beingness of every thing there is difference -- or différance --
because only through différance is one thing not another thing instead.
Différance comes before being; similarly, a trace comes before the
presence of a thing (as anything which is is itself by virtue of not being
something else, by differing, and that which it differs from remains as
a trace, that whose absence is necessary for it to be); so too writing
precedes speech -- a system of differences precedes any location of meaning
in articulation. See my summary of Derrida, Différance.
Deconstruction, as do other poststructural theories, declines
the structuralist assumption that structural principles are essences --
that there are universal structural principles of language which exist
'before' the incidence of language. (The emphasis on the concrete, historical
and contingent in opposition to the eternalities of essence reveals one
of deconstruction's filiations with existentialism.) All 'principles' of
existence (i.e., of experience) are historically situated and are structured
by the interplay of individual experience and institutional force, through
the language, symbols, environment, exclusions and oppositions of the moment
(and of the previous moments through which this one is constructed). Structures
are historical, temporary, contingent, operating through differentiation
and displacement.
There is no outside of the text; everything that we can know is text, that is, is constructed of signs in relationship. This claim does not mean that there is nothing outside of language: the claim refers to the realm of human knowledge, not to the realm of concrete existence (elusive as that might be). Deconstruction does not deny the existence of an independent, physical world.
All texts are constituted by difference from other texts (therefore similarity to them). Any text includes that which it excludes, and exists in its differences from/filiations with other texts.
Opposites are already united; they cannot be opposites otherwise. Nor can they be a unity, and be themselves. They are the alternating imprint of one another. There is no nihilism without logocentrism, no logocentrism without nihilism, no presence without absence, no absence without presence, and so forth.
Inherent in language itself is difference and deferral; it is impossible for language to be identical with its referents. A word or any other sign can only mobilize the play of the fields of signs from which it is distinguished, and from which it is of necessity removed. See quote from Barbara Johnson, below.
Inherent in language also is the contest between grammar and rhetoric. Grammar is the syntagmatic protocol, meaning as created by placement; rhetoric is the intertextual system of signs which makes what the grammar means, mean something else (irony and metaphor are principal examples). Grammatical and rhetorical meaning cannot be identical, and one may well not be able to assign a priority of 'meaning'.
In a sense deconstruction is profoundly historical: it sees temporality as intrinsic to meaning, in that meaning can only be structured against that which is before it, which is structured against that which is before that. Meaning is that which differs, and which defers. The claim is not that there is no meaning -- that is a misunderstanding of deconstruction: the claim is that what we take to be meaning is a shifting field of relations in which there is no stable point, in which dynamic opposing meanings may be present simultaneously, in which the meaning is textually modulated in a interweaving play of texts. Meaning circulates, it is always meaning by difference, by being other. The meaning-through-difference creates/draws on 'traces' or 'filiations', themselves in some senses historical.
Deconstruction is also historical insofar and it functions etymologically, turning to the root, often metaphorical, meanings of words for an understanding of how they function within the web of differentiation which spans the chasm of the non-human over which we constantly live.
as deconstruction works on (in both senses of 'works on') the web of differentiation which spans the chasm of the non-human over which we constantly live, it is intrinsically and deeply human and humane. It is affirmative of the multiplicity, the paradoxes, the richness and vibrancy, of our life as signifying beings. If it seems to deny affirmation, it is because it knows that affirmation is always, intimately and compellingly, itself, only in the presence of and by virtue of negation. To fully live we must embrace our deaths.
if deconstruction seems to oppose Humanism, it is because Humanism operates by substituting the concept 'man' for the concept 'God'(or 'order', 'nature', 'Truth', 'logos', etc.) and so placing 'man' as the unproblematic ground of meaningfulness for human life. It should be clear, however, that 'man' is then a hypothesized center, substituting for another hypothesized center, in the history of metaphysics. Deconstruction wants to clarify the instability upon which such a concept is grounded.
one can and indeed must work with ideas such as 'center', 'man', 'truth', but must work with them knowing their instability; to do so is, in deconstructive terms, to place them "under erasure." To signify this graphically, use the strikethrough option on your computer. That's the truth.
deconstructive reading can be applied to any text. It is a theory of reading, not a theory of literature. Derrida generally deconstructs philosophical writing, showing the metaphysical contradictions and the historicity of writing which lays claim to the absolute.
'literature' is a writing clearly open to deconstructive reading, as it relies so heavily on the multiple meanings of words, on exclusions, on substitutions, on intertextuality, on filiations among meanings and signs, on the play of meaning, on repetition (hence significant difference). In Jakobson's phrasing, literature attends to (or, reading as literature attends to), the poetic function of the text. This, in (one guesses) a Derridean understanding would mean that the naive, thetic, transcendental reading of a text is com-plicated (folded-with) by a counter-reading which de-constructs the thetic impetus and claims.
the more 'metaphysical' or universal and 'meaningful' a text the more powerfully it can provoke deconstructive reading; similarly as 'reading as literature' implies a raising of meaning to the highest level of universality, 'reading as literature' also calls forth the potential for a strong counter-reading. As Derrida says, "the more it is written, the more it shakes up its own limits or lets them be thought."
Some attributes of 'literature' in the deconstructive view are:
that literature is an institution, brought into being by legal, social
and political processes;
that literature is that which at the same time speaks the heart of
the individual and which shows how the individual is made possible only
by otherness, exteriority, institution, law, structures and meanings outside
oneself;
that literature is both (simultaneously) a singular, unrepeatable event
and a generalizable experience, and demonstrates the tension/ antithesis
between these -- as something which is original is also of necessity not
original, or it could not have been thought.
It is possible that texts which 'confess' the highly mediated nature
of our experience, texts which themselves throw the reader into the realm
of complex, contested, symbolized, intertextual, interactive mediated experience,
texts which therefore move closer than usual to deconstructing themselves,
are in a sense closer to reality (that is, the truth of our real experience)
than any other texts. This kind of text conforms to the kind of text known
as 'literature' -- most clearly, to modernist literature, but to all texts
which participate in one or more of the ironic, the playful, the explicitly
intertextual, the explicitly symbolizing -- from Renaissance love poetry
to Milton to Swift to Fielding to Tennyson to Ondaatje.
Reading these texts in the deconstructive mode is, however, not a matter of 'decoding the message'; it is a matter of entering into the thoughtful play of contradiction, multiple reference, and the ceaseless questioning of conclusions and responses. The less a text deconstructs itself, the more we can and must deconstruct it, that is, show the structures of thought and assumption which ground it and the exclusions which make its meaning possible. If, as Roman Jakobson suggests, a mark of literature is that it draws attention to its textuality, its constructedness, then literature may be said to be inherently closer to 'reality' than other forms of writing or discourse are, just when it seems to be furthest away, as our 'reality' is symbolic, signified, constructed.
The particular strategy of deconstructive reading is based on fissures in what we take to be the common-sense experience of texts and reality, and on reversals, oppositions and exclusions that are lying in wait in, or implicit in, signification and textuality. Take, for example, the sorts of conflict Jonathan Culler suggests in On Deconstruction that the critic is on the lookout for:
the asymetrical opposition or value-laden hierarchy (e.g. host and parasite,
logocentrism and nihilism) in which one term is promoted at the expense
of the other. The second term can be shown to constitute or signal the
condition for the first, and the hierarchy up-turned (this is not a simple
reversal, as the reversal is then in the condition of reversibility, and
so forth).
points of condensation, where a single term brings together different
lines of argument or sets of values (and hostilities to hosts hosting the
Host).
The text will be examined for ways in which it suggests a difference
from itself, interpretations which undermine the apparently primary interpretation.
figures of self-reference, when a text applies to something else a
description, figure or image which can be read as a self-description, an
image of its own operations. This opens up an examination of the stability
and cogency of the text itself. An example of self-reference is in the
vines and parasites in place of the erased (, i.e. under erasure) antique
and learned imagery of Shelley's "Epipsychidion" in Miller's "The Critic
as Host," the natural images themselves an image for and replacement for
(every image of is also a replacement for) the tracing of writing, which
is itself the writing that constitutes the poem; the images of the poem
themselves attempt to naturalize what cannot be naturalized, writing itself,
in a recuperation in which the act of naturalizing reveals itself as an
ancient strategy of meaning, so the imagery is an image of itself.
conflicting readings of a texts can be see as reenactments of conflicts
within a text, so that readings can be read as partializing moves simplifying
the complex interplay of potential meaning within the text.
Attention to the marginal, and that which supplements -- as with hierarchized
oppositions, the margin in fact encompasses or enables the rest, so that
a marginalized figure, idea, etc. can be re-read as the 'center', or controlling
element; similarly the supplement re-centers and re-orients that which
it supplements, as the fact of supplementing reveals the inadequacy, the
partiality/incompleteness of the supplemented item.
The deconstructive activity is ceaseless. It can never be resolved
in a dialectic (that is, there is no synthesis), 1) but is always reaching
back to a pattern of operations, antitheses, displacements and so forth,
each 'behind', or 'before', or logically, ontologically, referentially,
hierarchically, temporally or semantically or etymologically, etc, 'prior
to' the other, and 2) alternating between the poles of antitheses or opposite.
Like the form of mathematics called topography, deconstruction studies surfaces, as there are no depths, however firmly we may think we see them: there are only twists, (con)figurations, (re)visions.
Barbara Johnson on Derrida and deconstructive reading
from "On Writing" in Lentricchia and McLaughlin, eds, Critical
Terms for Literary Study:
Just as Freud rendered dreams and slips of the tongue readable rather
than dismissing them as mere nonsense or error, so Derrida sees signifying
force in the gaps, margins, figures, echoes, digressions, discontinuities,
contradictions, and ambiguities of a text. When one writes, one writes
more than (or less than, or other than) one thinks. The reader's task is
to read what is written rather than simply attempt to intuit what might
have been meant.
The possibility of reading materiality, silence, space, and conflict
within texts has opened up extremely productive ways of studying the politics
of language. If each text is seen as presenting a major claim that attempts
to dominate, erase, or distort various "other" claims (whose traces nevertheless
remain detectable to a reader who goes against the grain of the dominant
claim), then "reading" is its extended sense is deeply involved in questions
of authority and power. One field of conflict and domination in discourse
that has been fruitfully studied in this sense is the field of sexual politics.
Alice Jardine, in Gynesis (1985), points out that since logocentric logic
has been coded as 'male' the "other" logics of spacing, ambiguity, figuration,
and indirection are often coded as "female," and that a critique of logocentrism
can enable a critique pf "phallocentrism" as well....
The writings of Western male authorities have often encoded the silence, denigration, or idealization not only of women but also of other "others." Edward Said, in Orientalism (1978), analyzed the discursive fields of scholarship, art, and politics in which the "Oriental" is projected as the "other" of the European. By reading against the grain of the writer's intentions, he shows how European men of reason and benevolenced could inscribe a rationale for oppression and exploitation within their very discourse of Enlightenment.
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ESSAYS IN POSTMODERN CULTURE
Introduction: Antinomy in the Net
George Yudice, "Feeding the Transcendent Body"
Alison Fraiberg, "Of AIDS, Cyborgs, and Other Indiscretions"
David Porush and Alison Fraiberg, Commentary on "Of AIDS, Cyborgs,
and Other Indiscretions"
Stuart Moulthrop, "You Say You Want a Revolution"
Paul McCarthy, "Postmodern Pleasure and Perversity"
Roberto Dainotto, "The Excremental Sublime"
Audrey Ecstavasia, "Fucking (with Theory) for Money"
Elizabeth Wheeler, "Bulldozing the Subject"
Robert Perelman, "The Marginalization of Poetry"
Steven Helmling, "Marxist Pleasure"
Neil Larsen, "Postmodernism and Imperialism"
David Mikics, "Postmodernism, Ethnicity and Underground Revisionism"
Barrett Watten, "Post-Soviet Subjectivity"
About the Contributors
Note: The essays listed here refer to the original text that appeared
in the journal. The texts that appear in the print volume are revised versions
of those original publications.
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Last Modified: Thursday, 06-Feb-1997 13:34:10 EST
I agree with
some of the Poststructuralists ideas in the sense that the text is
the most important source of analysis. Sometimes in analising a text is
good to look at it from a objective point of view, forgetting about the
author because sometimes we find an explanation of the text in the author´s
life and we are misled.
In my opinion from the close analysis
of the text structure we can obtain very much information about the meaning
of it. If the author choses a particular rhythm, imagery, plot is for a
given purpose, or even If (s)he does not chose it purposefully the text
itself produces a particular meaning.
I do not agree with the idea of
not considering the author at all, in my opinion we can not based the analysis
on author´s life but when we analise a poem or a novel is important
to be able to empathize with the writer, trying to feel or
imagine what (s)he felt/thought when (s)he wrote or conceived her/his work.
I consider that this in that moment when you enjoy literature, where the
book is as a bridge that joins many human similar feelings.
The humanist tradition defendes that
the author produces the text reflecting in it his/her ideas, each language
feature is man´s creation and define his/her inner world while Poststructuralism
argues that language itself produces the text because our thoughts are
bound to the language, in his sense author´s ideas are language,
structures from the beginning.
It´s true that thought is
bound to language but literature is not only thought but also is feeling.
Contrary to what Poststructuralists say I believe that the text, is
an imperfect translation of author´s thoughts, a simplification of
them. The author´s conception/idea would be always better than
his work, although sometimes it can be worse, but never the same.
The idea of the centre is almost a mistical
one. The centre is presented as God, as the ever present idea/goal/feature
that is the result of all the structures and features together.
The centre is the father and the son,
the creator of a idea, the generator of the text on one hand, and on the
other hand is the final product, the result of all the little traits, the
simplified idea of the net of ideas and structures that intermingle in
the text.
© copyright Enna Villarroya Martínez 1999
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