Poststructuralism and Deconstruction

Poststructuralism

Philosophical and literary forms of theory both build upon and reject ideas established by structuralism. It is an intellectual movement that emerged in philosophy and the humanities in the 1960s and 1970s.

Post-structuralism rejects the idea of a literary text having a single purpose, a single meaning, or one singular existence. Instead, every individual reader creates a new and individual purpose, meaning, and existence for a given text. Rejects definitions that claim to have discovered absolute 'truths or facts about the world.

Certain meanings are elevated by social ideologies to a privileged position. Consider, in our own society, Freedom, Family, Democracy, Independence, Authority, Order, and so on, sometimes meanings are seen as the origin of all the others, the source from which they flow; but this, as we have seen, is a curious way of thinking, because for this meaning ever to have been possible other signs must already have existed.

Deconstruction

Meanings are not fixed. Phonocentrism. writer centered.

According to post-structuralist theory, literature can have no singular meaning for a number of reasons:

The first reason is that no two readers will be alike. Each person flipping through the pages will bring his or her own life experiences to the work, and with that, his or her own interpretation of the meaning of words and themes.