BEST THEORY

1. Post -
Structuralism

2. FLASH BACK

3. Struturalism
Sign = Signifier / Signified
Signifier??
Signified??

4. SIGN
 /tri:/
 “T-R-E-E” SIGNIFIED

5. Structure?
Nothing can be understood in Isolation.
Everything Should be understood
with in a Big structure.

6. Neem Tree
Coconut Tree , Palm tree,
Banyan tree, Rubber Tree,
Oak tree, Neem Tree, etc.
ECO
SYSTEM

7. BROTHER
FATHER, MOTHER,
SISTER, UNCLE,
AUNTY, GRANDPA,
GRANDMA,
BROTHER, COUSIN...
FAMILY

8. Seminar
journal Tel Quel
Language of Criticism an Science of
Man
John Hopkins University

9. JACQUES DERRIDA
“Structure, Sign, and
Play in the Discourse of
the Human Sciences”

10.  Claude Lévi-Strauss
Accuses sticking around “Centre”
“The Event”
This central term ironically
escapes structurality.
 "The center", therefore, "is not the
center.“
"the opposition between nature and
culture"

11. Triology of 1967
Of Grammatology
 Speech and Phenomena
 Writing and Difference

12. Of Gramatology
Translated by Gayatri Spivak.
Derrid’s PhD thesis.
Claude Lévi-Strauss, Ferdinand de
Saussure, Jean-Jacques Rousseau,
Martin Heidegger, Edmund Husserl,
Roman Jakobson.

13. 'There is nothing outside the text'
Speech over Writing
Logocentric
Phonocentric
Graphocentic
Sassure – a critique.

14. Binary Oppositions
Day/ night , Good/Evil ,
Man/Women, Reason/Mad ness,
Truth/Falsity
One is privilaged over another.
Archi Writing.

15. Writing and Difference
History of Madness, a critique
of Michel Foucault.
Emmanuel Levinas.

16. Roland Barthes
Structuralist > Post – Structuralist
 The Death of the Author (1967)
Element of semiology
S/Z

17. Death of the Author
The intentions and biographical context
of an author.
Intentional Fallacy.
I.A.RICHARDS
"scriptor" not “Author”.
“Birth of the Reader”.

18. S/Z
 "Sarrasine", the short story by Honoré
de Balzac.
 Barthes divides into 561 lexias.
 5 codes
 Hermeneutics (mysteries of text)
 Proairetic Code: the narrative drive of the text
 Semantic Code
 Symbolic Code
 Cultural Code

19. The Pleasure of the Text
plaisir and jouissance.
"readerly" and "writerly" texts.
The reader of a readerly text is largely
passive.
Writerly text needs extra effort.

20. Jacques Lacan
Structural Psychoanalyst
unconscious is structured like a
language.
Mirror Stage.

21. Deconstruction
 Derrida
 Martin Heidigger – “Destruktion”.
 unreliability or untrustworthiness of language.
 We are living in a “decentred universe”.
 No Stable meaning is there. (Madam)
 Meaning keep on changing from one signifier to
another.

22. What deconstructionists do?
 Internal Contradictions. (what is says is opposite to what it
actually mean)
 Binary Oppositions
 Aporia
 Etymology
 Ambiguity

23. Deconstructive reading
Guest = host (greek)
Solitary Reaper
I am Good/
You are beautiful
I am a lier. – sheep – play
“After first death there is no death”
Time flies like an arrow

24. Terms
 Binary Opposition
 Violent higherarchy
 Trace
 Trancendental signified
 différance.
 “to differ” “to defer”
 Presence/Absence (colour)
 Free Play

25. Yale critics
Paul de Man,
J. Hillis Miller,
 Geoffrey Hartman
Barbara Johnson
Harold Bloom.

26. Paul de Man
Blindness and Sight
Allegories of meaning
Resistance to Theory

27. Geoffrey Hartman
Boa Deconstructionist
Barely Deconstructionist

28. Harold Bloom
Anxiety of Influence
Misreading

29. Hillis Miller
Solitary reaper
Despute with M.H.Abrams
“Deconstructive Angel”
Language is not permenant but
they write in language.
Canny and uncanny
Double agent
“Critic as a Host”

30. Other Critics
Gilles Deleuze and Félix
Guattari – Rhizome
Foucault – Panoptican
Julia Kristiva – intertextuality
Jean Boudrillard – Simulacra