I discovered some quotes about two of my favorite subjects within the literary world: post moderism and post structuralism. These quotations may help clarify the difference. I also find them entertaining and have used a couple of them for writing prompts.
--e. smith sleigh, poet and author
website: http://esmithsleigh.weebly.com/
*Post Modernism:
"Post-modernism rejects originality and stresses the inevitability of appropriation in creative work.
The prefix 'post' signals a foundational debt and an unabashedly reactive position that departs
from a modernist make-it-new credo."
- Alice Fulton, in "The Measured Word", Kurt Brown (ed), Univ of Georgia Press, 2001, p.112
"Where once one sought a vocabulary for ideas, now one seeks ideas for vocabularies."
- Lyn Hejinian, in "The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E book", p.29
"Lyotard's distinction rests upon the idea that all knowledge, including scientific knowledge, ultimately draws
its legitimacy from agreements made by participants in a language game...In this sense all knowledge
is narrative knowledge, for all knowledge depends for its legitimacy upon values and beliefs constructed and
confirmed by a process of telling, and so an active relationship between addressor and addressee"
- "Postmodernism and Performance", Nick Kaye, Macmillan, 1994, p.18
Jean Baudrillard has suggested that the acceleration of modernity has reached escape velocity from the
gravitational pull of any grounding in reality or history.
- "The Year 2000 has Already Happened"
i.
"I will use the term modern
to designate any science that legitimates itself with reference to a
metadiscourse ... making an explicit appeal to some grand narrative, such as
the dialectics of the Spirit", p.xxvii
ii.
"a work can become modern only if
it is first postmodern", p.79
- From "The Postmodern Condition: a report on Knowledge", Lyotard, 1984
*Post Structuralism:
"Oddly, the last people in the humanities who are still talking about 'absolute truth' are the
Post-Structuralists in the business of demolishing it"
- Alan Bilton, "An Introduction to Contemprary American Fiction" Edinburgh University Press, 2002, p.11
"In retrospect, it seems clear that the era of poststructuralism was characterized by a decisive
intensification of attention to the process (rather than the product) of interpretation"
- Jeffrey T. Nealon , "The Swerve around P: Literary Theory after Interpretation", Postmodern Culture V17.3, 2007
"In the classical, Aristotelian view, experience is a doorway to the apprehension of essence; experience is
understood as a real and immediate presence and therefore as a reliable means of knowing. In the
Post-Structuralist Althusserian view, experience is a product of ideology. It is a sign mediated by other signs ...
empirical facts are always ideological productions"
- Diana Fuss, "Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature and Difference", Routledge, 1980, p.114
"This is a descriptive title that is sometimes used almost interchangeably with deconstruction while at other
times being seen as a more general, umbrella term", "Studying Literature"
- Goring, Hawthorn and Mitchell, Arnold, 2001, p.169
"For some [Post-Structuralism] is a matter of a more radical reading of Saussure, for others it is the moment at
which Structuralism becomes self-reflective. It is sometimes taken as a critique of Structuralism, sometimes a development of it. [...] If one wanted to date the appearance of Post-Structuralism then 1966/7 would be a reasonable place to
start [...] The moment of Structuralism and the moment of Post-Structuralism almost coincide in terms of their appearance and adoption in Anglo-American literary theory. [...] if the categories of literature and literary studies do not refer to things-in-themselves, but are constructed in difference then the act of criticism which articulates that difference cannot be viewed as
subordinate. Rather, it is of equal importance to the literature it studies"
- "Modern Literary Theory (3rd Edition)", Rice and Waugh, Arnold, 1996, p.114-5.
"The key difference between structuralism and poststructuralism is located in the latter's more radical
extension of Saussurean linguistic theory. Structuralism recognised [that signifieds' ] relationship with
their signifiers [was] arbitrary. However, once this relationship has been fixed in language, signifier and
signified become defined and stable. Poststructuralism denies that stability of this kind is possible"
- Steve Padley, Key Concepts in Contemporary Literature, Palgrave MacMillan, 2006, p.181
*from the website Some Literary Criticism
Here's an Update: A book of quotes