Chapter 3: Post Structuralism and Deconstruction
Structuralism claimed to be objective and scientific and that by being systematic, it would yield answers . However there were never any answers. Roland Barthes' 'The Death of the Author' became the turning point in structuralism. Death here is figurative - when the book is complete and published and the author no longer has any control over the book and how it is read and what meanings are drawn from his/her text. "The death of the author is the birth of the reader." Post-structuralism reveals that everything has a centre except for language. A centre is basically the structure, a point of reference - the Sun in the Solar System, Jupiter for all its moons, for instance. Language cannot have a centre. It is fluid and dynamic. This is the reason that one word may have more than one meaning. In structuralism: A specific domain of culture understood through a structure Modelled on language Relates literary texts to a larger structure (a particular genre) E...