The dates of Modernism are disputable, it can be rightly claimed that nascent Modernism budded with the Avant-Garde (a military metaphor, meaning ‘advance guard’) which refers to a small, self-conscious group of artists and authors who deliberately undertook, in Ezra… Read More ›
“On or about December 1910 human nature changed.” – Virginia Woolf wrote in her essay Mr Bennett and Mrs. Brown in 1924. “All human relations shifted,” Woolf continued, “and when human relations change there is at the same time a change… Read More ›
In the wake on Postmodernist critique of modernism and liberal humanism, and with the vogue of Derridean deconstruction and decentering of the subject/centre, the Western canon of “great” books, not only in literature but in all areas of humanistic study, has… Read More ›
A term popularised by Julia Kristeva in her analysis of Bakhtin’s concepts Dialogism and Carnival, intertextuality is a concept that informs structuralist poststructuralist deliberations in its contention that individual texts are inescapably related to other texts in a matrix of… Read More ›
The Yale School is the name given to an influential group of literary critics, theorists, and philosophers of literature who were influenced by Jacques Derrida’s philosophy of deconstruction. Many of the theorists were affiliated with Yale University in the late… Read More ›
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 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 ›
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” 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 ›
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 ›
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 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, 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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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