A Short Course in Post-Structuralism

Abstract

Post-structuralism might be described as a challenge to accepted model of reading and of criticism. The traditional application model of literary criticism (reflected in title of this conference), puts in number one spot reader; in number two spot, method, or approach; in number three spot text (what we read); and in fourth spot, reading (or what comes out other end). To give these terms somewhat different, more philosophical or exalted, names, we might call reader or self, I-whoreads; method could be called the interpretive framework; we could call text the so it sounds more philosophical and abstract; and we could call what comes out other end, when subject takes framework and applies it to object, Such an understanding of reading, as a process of application, implies that critical modes can be assumed, applied, and then dropped: post-structuralism on Monday, reader-response criticism on Tuesday, cultural criticism on Wednesday. The reader is thus a dramatic persona who picks up each one of these systems, like a pair of eyeglasses, and looks through it at text to filter interpretation. In other words, there are four discrete entities: reader; method (post-structuralism, feminism, Marxism, psychoanalytic criticism, cultural studies, etc.); text (Heart of Darkness, or whatever you happen to be reading); and what emerges as an interpretation. Now, significance of post-structuralist model is that it collapses all four of these entities into a simultaneity, into a single, continuous act of interpretation so that, instead of four discrete items in a row-subject, method, object, interpretation-all are part of a single, evolving field of discourse. In effect, post-structuralism collapses position one (the reader) into position two (the crit-