Criticism and ideology

In 1957 Northrop Frye published the influential Anatomy of Criticism. In his works Frye noted that some critics tend to embrace an ideology, and to judge literary pieces on the basis of their adherence to such ideology.

In the British and American literary establishment, the New Criticism was more or less dominant until the late 1960s. Around that time Anglo-American university literature departments began to witness a rise of a more explicitly philosophical literary theory, influenced by structuralism, then post-structuralism, and other kinds of Continental philosophy. It continued until the mid-1980s, when interest in "theory" peaked. Many later critics, though undoubtedly still influenced by theoretical work, have been comfortable simply interpreting literature rather than writing explicitly about methodology and philosophical presumptions.

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Grammatical structures and tropes

In literary structuralism, especially in France, the analysis of deep grammatical structures went hand in hand with the analysis of rhetorical tropes (figures of discourse).

What this means is that the two axes of language, the syntagmatic (at the level of the generated sentence) and the paradigmatic (the axis of substitutions) can be read as operating together in a discourse. We can thus explain what Paul de Man means by “assimilations of rhetorical transformations or combinations to syntactical, grammatical patterns” with reference to the coexistence in structuralist theory of patterns of both metonymy (which is syntagmatic) and metaphor (which is paradigmatic).

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Post-structuralism as radicalization

Contemporary trends in usage seem to employ the term 'post-structuralism' less, rather than to engage with a specific body of scholarship, as there is no unified post-structuralist position with which to engage.

The term is also used as shorthand for what is seen as a radicalization of the French, academic left—and its American cousins—following the failure of the May 1968 French-student protests to produce a much-hoped-for revolution. This aspect also has some institutional context: many figures associated with post-structuralism were associated with the University of Paris VIII Vincennes in the northern Parisian suburb of Saint-Denis, established as part of the reorganisation of the French university system in general, and the Sorbonne in particular, either serving on its faculty or as formal and informal advisors on matters of faculty and pedagogy.

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Critical reading

Basically, many who began by stating that texts could be interpreted based solely on the cultural and social circumstances of the author came to believe that the reader's culture and society shared an equal part in the interpretation of a piece.

If the reader sees it in one way, how do we know that that is the way the author intended? We don't.

Therefore, critical reading seeks to find the contradictions that an author inevitably includes in any given work. Those inconsistencies are used to show that the interpretation and criticism of any literature is in the hands of the individual reader and will necessarily include that reader's own cultural biases and assumptions.

While many structuralists first thought that they could tease out an author's intention by close scrutiny, they soon found so many disconnections, that it was obvious that their own experiences lent a (possibly different) view that was unique to them.

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Diachronic and synchronic reading

Post-structuralists generally assert that post-structuralism is historical, and classify structuralism as descriptive.

This terminology relates to Ferdinand de Saussure's distinction between the views of historical (diachronic) and descriptive (synchronic) reading. From this basic distinction, post-structuralist studies often emphasize history to analyze descriptive concepts. By studying how cultural concepts have changed over time, post-structuralists seek to understand how those same concepts are understood by readers in the present.

For example, Michel Foucault's Madness and Civilization is both a history and an inspection of cultural attitudes about madness. The theme of history in modern Continental thought can be linked to such influences as Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Friedrich Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morals and Martin Heidegger's Being and Time.

Structuralists also seek to understand the historical interpretation of cultural concepts, but focus their efforts on understanding how those concepts were understood by the author in his or her own time, rather than how they may be understood by the reader in the present.

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How knowledge is produced

The general assumptions of post-structuralism derive from critique of structuralist premises.

Specifically, post-structuralism holds that the study of underlying structures is itself culturally conditioned and therefore subject to myriad biases and misinterpretations. To understand an object (e.g. one of the many meanings of a text), it is necessary to study both the object itself, and the systems of knowledge which were coordinated to produce the object.

In this way, post-structuralism positions itself as a study of how knowledge is produced.

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reader as primary subject

In the post-structuralist approach to textual analysis, the reader replaces the author as the primary subject of inquiry.

This displacement is often referred to as the "destabilizing" or "decentering" of the author, though it has its greatest effect on the text itself. Without a central fixation on the author, post-structuralists examine other sources for meaning (e.g., readers, cultural norms, other literature, etc.). These alternative sources are never authoritative, and promise no consistency. Texts signify from the "world" and from the position of one who is looking.

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Variety of perspectives

A post-structuralist critic must be able to utilize a variety of perspectives to create a multifaceted interpretation of a text, even if these interpretations conflict with one another.

It is particularly important to analyze how the meanings of a text shift in relation to certain variables, usually involving the identity of the reader.

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Invention of american academics

Post-structuralism is difficult to define or summarize.

There are two main reasons for this. First, it rejects definitions that claim to have discovered absolute 'truths' or facts about the world. Second, very few people have willingly accepted the label 'post-structuralist'; rather, they have been labeled as such by others. Therefore no one has felt compelled to construct a 'manifesto' of post-structuralism. Thus the exact nature of post-structuralism and whether it can be considered a single philosophical movement is debated.

Indeed, it has often been pointed out that the term is not widely used in Europe (where most supposedly "post-structuralist" theory originates) and that the concept of a post-structuralist theoretical paradigm is largely the invention of American academics and publishers.

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