Author Archives

• 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 ›

• Semiotics/ Semiology

  By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on March 20, 2016 • ( 5 )

  

  A highly influential branch of study, Semiotics or the study of signs, can be considered the foundation for literary theory. Many of the revolutionary theories of the twentieth century, such as Structuralism and Poststructuralism, Structural Anthropology (Levi-Strauss), Psychoanalysis (Lacan), Cultural… Read More ›

• Linguistic Sign

  By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on March 20, 2016 • ( 0 )

  

  Announcing a revolutionary change in the study of language, which had been hitherto philological, Saussure with his Course in General Linguistics (1916), introduced Structural Linguistics, which considers language as a system of signs constructed by cultural conventions. Constituting of a… Read More ›

• Saussurean Structuralism

  By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on March 20, 2016 • ( 7 )

  

  Saussure introduced Structuralism in Linguistics, marking a revolutionary break in the study of language, which had till then been historical and philological. In his Course in General Linguistics (1916), Saussure saw language as a system of signs constructed by convention…. Read More ›

• Structuralism

  By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on March 20, 2016 • ( 22 )

  

  The advent of critical theory in the post-war period, which comprised various complex disciplines like linguistics, literary criticism, Psychoanalytic Criticism, Structuralism, Postcolonialism etc., proved hostile to the liberal consensus which reigned the realm of criticism between the 1930s and `50s. Among… Read More ›

• New Criticism’s Relation to Modernism

  By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on March 18, 2016 • ( 0 )

  

  New Criticism and Modernism emerged out of a world that was perceived as fragmented, with the Enlightenment ideals of rationality, progress and justice discredited; the artist alienated from the social and political world, and art and literature marginalised. The vast… Read More ›

• Chicago School (Neo-Aristotelians)

  By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on March 18, 2016 • ( 2 )

  

  The Chicago School of critics or the Neo-Aristotelians included professors of the departments of Humanities, University of Chicago, who were engaged in bringing about a radical transformation in an attempt to revive Humanities and make them institutionally more competitive with… Read More ›

• Connotation and Denotation

  By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on March 18, 2016 • ( 3 )

  

  Connotation and Denotation are crucial concepts in Semiotics, Structuralism, Marxism, Cultural Studies and in the entire realm of literary and cultural theory. Denotation refers to the primary signification or reference – the definitional, literal, obvious meaning of a sign. In… Read More ›

• Hillis Miller’s Concept of Critic as Host

  By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on March 18, 2016 • ( 2 )

  

  The prominent Yale critic, J. Hillis Miller’s The Critic as host could be viewed as a reply to M.H. Abrams The Deconstructive Angel, which he presented at a session of the Modern Language-Association in December 1976, criticizing deconstruction and the methods… Read More ›