Definition: what’s common in them?

They both are dealing with instability of meaning and subject.
Subject in the sense of:
- subject matter
- human subject
a certain celebration of openness, plurality and difference.
both are determined to the play of indeterminacy within and around meaning

Difference in background:

Post-structuralism (PS) grows out of the academic background of linguistics, anthropology and philosophy.
Post-modernism’s (PM) background: artistic and literary. It’s primarily concerned with communication and multimedia.
Post (suffix) = after something
in a chronological sense, after something
and / or different from
a result of / an extension of / a reaction to something
some about PM: after and a result or / and different from modernism.

Structuralism:

Backgrounds:
- Formal linguistics: Chomsky, Jakobson, Ferdinand Saussure
- structural anthropology: Lewis Stauss → to his name we can link: structural interpretation of myth.
- Early writers of French theorists: Roland Bart, Jackue. Derida, J. Lacan 1960s, 70s,

What all theorists have in common: the understanding of the phenomena of works, poems myths, social practices narratives etc. not as discrete entities, but as part of larger structures of systems.

The emphases is on: making sense of things as signs, as part of larger sign system and to study how sign systems related to each other.
That’s why structuralism is very much associated with semiotics.
Semiology = study of sign system.

PS: can be linked with the later writings of Bart and Derrida (sometimes a structuralist himself becomes a PS-ist).
Foucault: in addition to them is definitely a “post” quality. They “exploded” the premises of structuralism.
Roland Bart’s most influential work: Death of the Author (1965) – 1st PS writing, and The Pleasure of the Text (1975).
Derida’s text (a conference paper, U.S. John Hopkins University), later published in volume form, and it’s a good example of how French theory communicated with American literary critics. Derida “transported” this. Structure, Sign and Play (1978).
This text is crucial, in the sense that it’s the starting point of PS movement.
Structuralist approach would treat sign systems as complete (egész, befejezett), which is potentially knowable system, with a notional centre.
In contrast to that PS approach: would treat sign systems as incomplete, unfinished, unknowable with many notional centers, or none at all.

PS: concentrates on what we can grasp is only fragments. So we should concentrate on: depths, silences, holes in the systems. Example: interpret a poem.

Structuralist: would try to discover the underlying structure on which the whole system cold be interpreted.

PS tries to find: what’s not there and adds what’s there. It’s examines what’s uttered by the poem, but in the text of the poem there’re absences. They want to know what’s unuttered.

Structuralist argue: there’s a unity, while PS says: there’s no such unity.
- Example: gondoljunk egy horgolt terítőre. Sok a lyuk. A terítő a lyukaktól lesz az, ami. Ami nincs ott, az adja az értelmét, A vers olyan mint egy csipketerítő.
Structuralist: a terítőt a terítő jellegéből magyarázzák (kerek, szögletes, stb).
PS: azt vizsgálja, “milyenek a lyukak”. A poem,, novel etc. says something. But we have to understand what isn’t there.

Structuralism: concentrates on sense making activities (colour, size, etc of the table cloth) → may produce several sense.

PS: nonsense making activities, or making sense otherwise, other alternative
We have to examine the different patterns of the table cloth.

Post-Modernism: (PM) – background: arts, literature.

Modernism: (early literary movement Yeats, Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence, H.G. Wells, William Carlos Williams, Beckett, etc.)
- → non-realist representation as opposed to the 19th century classic realism.
It involves several strategies collage, montage (montázs), stream of consciousness, self-reflexive fragmentary techniques.
Modernist concentrates on a traditionally literary medium: written work they consider literature as high art.

Post Modernism:
considers cultural as popular, rather than elitist, high culture
focuses on multimedia
Reaction to (or critique of) PS-ism PM-ism

PM: attacked by:
- Marxism, feminism, and neo-colonialism
PS: attacked by:
- Marxist, feminist and post-colonist critiques, saying that PS-ism is only a practical game which is finally debilitating and self defeating.
They argue: if all difference and centers are arbitrary, that what what grounds are there at all for morally and politically informed preferences? = If there’s no centre, only endless of differences and centers, than there’s no ground for moral and political statement and preferences.
They however recognize the power of PS-ist deconstruction to challenge neutral differences, hierarchies and fixed centers.
Some feminist critics say: the PS-ist techniques is a powerful tool to challenge the hierarchy of male-female differences. (These differences aren’t natural, or natural, but socially based):
Colonialism focuses on edges

Language, Discourse, Text

Structuralism grew out of formal linguistics → Ferdinand Saussure – modern linguistics → structuralism, as a method, was developed by him.

PS: theories go back to him.
Language: system of language
Parole: utterance, actual language. use
Saussure: language. consist of words.
Words: verbal sign, having 2 sides.
Signifier (jelölő), signified (jelölt).
The connection between them: arbitrary and isn’t always the same, hanem a nyelvhasználók megegyezésén alapul.
Linguistics system: a series of differences of sounds and series of differences of ideas
Although there’s an arbitrary relationship (discrepancy), yet there’s a natural .tendency that it’ll be corrected and the signified will find its own signifier. Than they’ll form a positive unite.
There’s a certain stability in signification.
PS-ist approach challenges this idea. They discovered that we can’t predict surely the outcome of process of signification. It questions the stability of signification.
The unity of sign is questioned. Example: use a dictionary to find a word (signified of a signifier).
There’s an endless postpone of meaning. Each of the words in the dictionary may become another signifier.
R. Bart:
- he realized that the process of signification isn’t a signal act.
- He stressed the process of signification. The quality of process is the most important.
- defines literary as the message of signification of things and not their meaning. “By signification I refer to the process, which produces the meaning and this meaning itself”: signification → process that produces the meaning, and not this meaning itself.
- Critical interrelations are fictive, don’t stand as external truth.
- Construction of meaning. is more important than the meaning itself.
- According to him, each meaning is fictive in all interpretations.
- Turning point in his theory → meaning!
R. Bart - Death of the Author (DofA)= the birth of the reader.
- Bart rejects rejects the orig. view that:
- the author is the origin of the text and the only authority of interpretation.
- the author is the only source of the text
- the idea of DofA is very much related to the previous discover: signification should be understood primarily as a process.
- Logical: reading is realized by the reader.
- Significance: it questions the authority of interpretation, the significance of the author.
- If the author’s “killed”, readers are born, so many readers will have many different interpretations.
- The process of signification will produce a great variety of possible meanings, so the author’s reduced to a location, where language – that infinite store- house of representations, citations, references – crosses each other. The reader can freely enter to the text, and there’s no one single correct way of entering the text
New in Bart’s theory: the reader is free to open and close the text signifying process without any respect for the signified.
R. Bart - The pleasure of the text:
- Power / freedom of the reader
- 2 senses of pleasure:
- Bliss – essence (tömény)
- Deluted – form of bliss = Pleasure (hígított)
- What gives pleasure?
  - The general pleasure of the text: whatever excides a single, transparent meaning. (When we have the feeling of richness and complexity).
  - When we read, we experience a reference. We have association that is going on parallel with opening the text process of signification.
  - When we’re reading: our minds (memories) are full of other texts. There’re echoes, repetitions, etc. We read intertextually.
  - What gives pleasure is: the being relatedness.
- Our reading isn’t limited to the actual text. Example: we read pride and prejudice. We’re not reading that one single text. So this gives please!
- Our reading practice is very much conforming to the cultural habits. (Example: Jane Austen: we may read her novel with an awareness / ignorance to other books by her).

Bliss:
- experience as boredom → when a text unsettles the readers’ historical, cultural experience, it may be close to boredom, but after a while, we may bet bliss.
- Bart: differentiates with two types of texts:
- Readerly text: if the reader is passive consumer of a fixed meaning.
- Writerly text: when the text allows the reader to produce the meaning, the reader is actively producing meaning.
- It’s not the writer who writes the text, but the reader, when reading the text.
- (Bővebben ld: Bevezetés az Irodalom tudományba szept. 12. 2005)

Text:
- Definition 1.: the text is any instance of a verbal record → narrow.
- Definition 2.: the text is any instance of the organization of human signs in any code or medium. → broader
- A text may activate an infinite number of meanings and infinite umber of voices.
- The organization of human signs should be a cultural object, produced by people.
- Derida - Structure Sign and Play:
  - “The language bears in itself the necessity of its own critic”. – Saussure
  - Derida: “any text inevitable undermines its own claim to have a definite meaning and licenses the reader to produce his / her own meanings out of it, by the activity of semantic free play