This document provides an overview of post-structuralism. It discusses how post-structuralism emerged in the 1960s and focuses on how language shapes thought and reality rather than serving as a transparent medium of communication. It discusses some key writers of post-structuralism like Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva and Michel Foucault. Some of the main ideas discussed are that the meaning of a text is interpreted by the reader rather than defined by the author, and that meaning is multifaceted rather than singular. It also discusses how post-structuralism views language and discourse as historically constructed rather than stable or universal.

1. Muhammad Ibrahim Khalil
Assignment: Post Structuralism
Roll No: numl-s20-25041
University: NUML Islamabad

2. Post Structuralism
• This movement has begun in 1960s.
• Hyphenated term ends the structuralism,
unhyphenated term is not ended but has
rooted in the past.
• Language is not a transparent medium that
connects one directly with a ‘truth’ or
‘reality’ outside it but rather a structure or
code, whose parts derive their meaning
from their contrast with one another and
not from any connection with an outside
world.
• Writers: Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan,
Julia Kristeva and Michel Foucault.

3.  New criticism got some idea from Post
Structuralism.
 International Fallacy says that a poem
does not belong to its author but to the
public.
 ‘Self’ is a singular and coherent entity.
 Author meaning is secondary to the
meaning that reader perceives.
 There is no single purpose, single
meaning or singular existence of a
literary text but it has multifaceted
interpretation.

4.  The reader replaces the author as a primary
subject of inquiry; decentering of the author.
 To understand the meaning is to ‘deconstruct’
the assumption and knowledge system, which
produce the illusion of singular meaning.
 Roland Barthes(Element of semiology 1967)
Meta language is a systematized way of talking
about concepts like meaning and grammar
beyond the constraints of a traditional language.
In meta language symbols replace words and
phrases.
 A text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its
destination.

5.  Roland Barthes(the death of the Author,
1968) reveals that author is not the prime
source of the work.
 Birth of the reader means liberate a text
from the tyranny of the author.
 The birth of the reader must be at the cost
of the death of the Author.
 Text is the tissue(fabric) of quotation.
 Author is merely a ‘scripter’ is to exist but
not to explain the work.
 It contextualize the text and encourages
the multiplicity of the meaning in the
literary text.
 We live in a linguistic universe.

6.  Language is not a transparent medium,
language shapes our thought process.
 Reality gets constructed through linguistic
science.
 Discourse is rooted in historicity.
 Meanings are not stable and nor universal.
 Foucault develops the idea of power and
knowledge.
 Jeremy Bentham presents panopticon; a
total surveillance
 Foucault introduces the concept of
‘biopower’ means disciplinary power and
‘biopolitics’ means invest people’s lives at
a biological level.


7.  Jacque Lacan a French
Psychoanalysist was born in 1901 and
died in 1981.
 Lacan is borrowing Saussure’s study of
linguistics, he is able to determine that the
unconscious is structured like language.
 Lacan tends to associate the imaginary
with the restricted sphere of
consciousness with self-awareness.
 Lacan says that the symbolic order
structures the visual field of the imaginary,
which means that it involves a linguistic
dimension. If the signifier in the foundation
of the symbolic, the signified and
signification are part of the imaginary
order.
 Lacan says that the ego is an object rather
than a subject.