Chinese Literary Studies and Post-Structuralist Positions: What Next?

Abstract

By the early 1970s, the spectre of post-structuralism had begun to haunt the corridors of certain departments of English and Philosophy in a number of French, American and English tertiary institutions. The term 'deconstruction' was variously seen as provocative and essential or, conversely, as politically-charged, unintelligible and unnecessary by the many academics and critics who either flocked to embrace it or dismissed it out of hand. There were not too many people who were able to maintain neutrality in relation to the 'newspeak' of post-structuralist discourse, and the term 'deconstruction', with which this discourse was most frequently associated, came to signify a crisis of grand proportions in literary studies for its opponents and proponents alike. Deconstruction revealed through the many textual strategies adopted in its name that the discipline of literary studies was governed less by authoritative and reliable rules of analysis and interpretation than by an unhappy pluralism which masked its uncertainties through the privileging of literature, like philosophy, as language in its most authentic form. By the 1980s, battles fought in the name of poststructuralism/deconstruction had largely been won, thanks in part to the support lent by many postgraduate students in various disciplines of the Humanities who committed themselves to the task of mastering the 'newspeak' and its problematic concepts and who embarked on their