Author Archives

• Aporia

  By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on March 22, 2016 • ( 0 )

  

  The word “aporia” originally came from Greek which, in philosophy, meant a philosophical puzzle or state of being in puzzle, and a rhetorically useful expression of doubt. In contemporary theoretical parlance, the term has more been associated with deconstructive criticism,… Read More ›

• Deconstruction

  By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on March 22, 2016 • ( 10 )

  

  Deconstruction involves the close reading of texts in order to demonstrate that any given text has irreconcilably contradictory meanings, rather than being a unified, logical whole. As J. Hillis Miller, the preeminent American deconstructionist, has explained in an essay entitled Stevens’… Read More ›

• Jacques Derrida: Transcendental Signified

  By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on March 22, 2016 • ( 1 )

  

  Upholding the notion of decentering, Derrida asserts that a “fixed” structure is a myth, and that all structures desire “immobility” beyond free play, which is impossible. The assumption of a centre expresses the desire for a “reassuring certitude” which stands… Read More ›

• Derrida’s Formulation of Ecriture

  By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on March 22, 2016 • ( 0 )

  

  Derrida’s formulation of “ecriture” emerges from his criticism of the most significant binaries of speech and writing. Discussing these binaries in his essay Signature Event Context (1972), in an attempt to reorient the established hierarchy of speech over wrifing, (what he… Read More ›

• Derrida: Trace and Play

  By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on March 22, 2016 • ( 0 )

  

  With the death of the author as theorised by Barthes, the text gets liberated and revels in an endless freeplay of meanings, and escapes from all forms of textual authoriy. As words/ signs erupt into multitudes of signifiers that differ and defer… Read More ›

• Derrida’s Concept of Differance

  By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on March 22, 2016 • ( 2 )

  

  A concept introduced by Derrida, differance is a pun on “difference” and “deferment”, and is that attribute of language, by which meaning is generated because of a word’s difference from other words in a signifying system, and at the same… Read More ›

• Derrida’s Notion of the Centre

  By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on March 22, 2016 • ( 2 )

  

  Decentering in poststructuralism is a consequence of Derrida’s critique of binary oppositions, especially of speech/writing, where he accused Saussure of privileging speech over writing, owing to the presence, and authority of the speaker. Terming it as phonocentrism, which is a… Read More ›

• Derrida’s Critique of Logocentrism

  By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on March 21, 2016 • ( 3 )

  

  Derrida’s concept of deconstruction displaced structuralism and undertook to decentre or subvert the traditional claims for the existence of all foundations such as knowledge, meaning, truth and the subject. Derrida identifies in all of Western philosophic traditions, a logocentrism or… Read More ›

• Jacques Derrida’s Structure, Sign and Play

  By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on March 21, 2016 • ( 5 )

  

  Jacques Derrida, A French philosopher, critically engages  with structuralism. He comments on what the structure is and engages with the politics of the structure itself, what he terms as the “structurality of structure”. This essay showcases the extent of limits… Read More ›

• Philosophical Influences on Poststructuralism

  By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on March 21, 2016 • ( 1 )

  

  Unlike structuralism that derived from linguistics, poststructuralism owes its origin to philosophy, which as a discipline, always tends to emphasise the difficulty in achieving complete and secure knowledge about things. This point is encapsulated in Nietzsche’s famous remark: “There are… Read More ›

• Poststructuralism

  By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on March 21, 2016 • ( 13 )

  

  The second half of the twentieth century, with its torturous experiences of the World Wars, Holocaust and the advent of new technologies, witnessed revolutionary developments in literary theory that were to undermine several of the established notions of Western literary… Read More ›

• Myth Criticism of Northrop Frye

  By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on March 21, 2016 • ( 3 )

  

  Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism (1957) introduced the archetypal approach called Myth Criticism, combining the typological interpretation of the Bible and the conception of imagination prevalent in the writings of William Blake. Frye continued the formalist emphasis of New Criticism… Read More ›

• Structuralist Narratology 

  By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on March 21, 2016 • ( 3 )

  

  Espoused by Tzvetan Todorov and Roland Barthes, Structuralist Narratology illustrates how a story’s meaning develops from its overall structure (the langue) rather than from each individual story’s isolated theme (the parole). According to Aristotle, all narratives develop longitudinally, from beginning to… Read More ›

• Claude Levi Strauss’ Concept of Bricolage

  By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on March 21, 2016 • ( 9 )

  

  In The Savage Mind (1962), the French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss used the word bricolage to describe the characteristic patterns of mythological thought. Bricolage is the skill of using whatever is at hand and recombining them to create something new. Levi-Strauss… Read More ›

• Claude Levi Strauss’ Structural Anthropology

  By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on March 21, 2016 • ( 3 )

  

  Applying Saussurean principles to the realm of anthropology, Claude Levi Strauss in his Structuralist Anthropology (1958) analysed cultural phenomena including mythology, kinship and food preparation. Employing the concepts of langue and parole in his search for the fundamental structures of the human… Read More ›

• Roland Barthes’ Concept of Mythologies

  By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on March 21, 2016 • ( 1 )

  

  Differing from the Saussurean view that the connection between the signifier and signified is arbitrary, Barthes argued that this connection, which is an act of signification, is the result of collective contract, and over a period of time, the connection… Read More ›

• Roland Barthes’ Analysis of Balzac’s Sarrasine

  By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on March 21, 2016 • ( 3 )

  

  Barthes’ analysis of Balzac’s Sarassin in S/Z (1970) has led to some major development in poststructuralist theory. Barthes identifies two main types of literature, roughly corresponding to the 19th century realist novel and the twentieth century experimental modernist novel. Traditionally, the realist… Read More ›

• Roland Barthes’ Concept of Readerly and Writerly Texts

  By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on March 21, 2016 • ( 1 )

  

  One of the seminal contributions of Roland Barthes, a versatile literary and cultural critic and semiologist, was the poststructuralist distinction between two main types of texts roughly corresponding to nineteenth century realism and twentieth century experimental modernism. In his 1970… Read More ›

• Roland Barthes’ Concept of Death of the Author

  By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on March 20, 2016 • ( 3 )

  

  Roland Barthes’ Death of the Author (1968) plays a pioneering role in contemporary theory as it encapsulates certain key ideas of Poststructuralist theory and also marks Barthes’ transition from structuralism to poststructuralism. The title itself, in a rhetorical way announces… Read More ›

• Roland Barthes’ Contribution to Literary Criticism

  By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on March 20, 2016 • ( 2 )

  

  Embodying a transformation from structuralism to poststructuralism, Roland Barthes, though initially characterised by a Marxist perspective, extended structural analysis and semiology to broad cultural phenomena, and promulgated and popularised the Poststructuralist notions of “the death of the author”, of the… Read More ›