Major Concepts of Poststructuralism

Provider: Kate Liu / 劉紀雯

Major Concepts of Poststructuralism: Some Post-Structural Assumptions (remote)

1. The play of signifiers:  (It moves, it multiplies, it is material and exchangeable.)
The stable connection/unity of signifier and signified is challenged.  More emphasis is put on the signifier, and its play. critique of meaning

2. Anti-Humanism critique of human subject
The notion of the subject as a unity of consciousness and agent has been challenged.  e.g.

• Foucault in The Order of Things traces the emergence of "Man" in modernity and the end of Man in the postmodern times.
• Foucault's discussion of the "author" as a discursive unit; the splitting of subject into the subject of enunciation and the enunciated subject.
• Lacan: the subject split since the mirror stage, by desire

3. De-Totalization, De-Doxification:  of History and Traditional Philosophy (

4. Self-Reflexivity & Concerns with Representation : Theory and practice are no longer separable.  Theories become more self-reflexive.

Major Theorists:

Early influences:Mikhail Bahktin

(Difference between Bahktin and Barthes in their view of referentiality)

Bahktin: The relation between art and reality is defined by chronotope.   Chronotope is the process of assimilating real time and space; it is the historical time and space artistically shaped and expressed in art.

Barthes: In the most realistic novel, the referent has no "reality."  What we called "real" is never more than a code of representation: it is never a code of execution: the novelistic real is not operable.

Roland Barthes

Michelle Foucault

Barthes and Foucault (An Outline by Allison Lin)
　

(external) Literary Criticism Databank: Structuralism and Semiotics