One of the most famous figures of poststructuralism, Jacques Derrida, died on the 8 October 2004. Over the following days, weeks and months, newspapers and other media the world over contained reactions, responses, comments and obituaries to Derrida. Many of these were surprisingly hostile; they were often irreverent and disrespectful; and often also mocking, joking and scornful.
—Paul Bowman
I ran a search on the reaction to Poststructuralism in literature. The result was surprising and not. The word reaction was used in the context of how Poststructuralism reacted to other movements that developed before it. Well, aren’t all movements a reaction. My question was how did literature react to post structuralism.
Here’s what I discovered. The response to poststructuralist theory was overreaction, especially from those in the academic community who fear change. Academics were still attempting to adapt to postmodernism when post structuralism came along. The result was negativism. The irony is academic departments disparaged Poststructuralism as negative. What did academics desire? Did they expect poetry and other writing to continue stuck in the last century’s bucolic world of Robert Penn Warren’s early works.
The entire world changed during those first few years of the millennium. The United States was transformed from coasting to imploding. Was this a time to write about events in an idealized wood as jobs and homes were lost for good? I read essays written during the millennial shift that called for literature to renew itself—to change—for something new to arise. It did. Thanks to post structuralism the old formulas are gone and it’s time for United States educational institutions, literary journals and magazines to acknowledge it. Let go of the antiquated.
Most academics preach against the theory because of post structuralism’s lack of structure and anything goes attitude, but half of the fun of analyzing or writing literature with post-structuralist methods is the high likelihood of unexpected results.
Writing in a post structuralism context enables a freedom from form and stricture that is not presented in secondary education and or at the university level. Post structuralism sees literature as irreducibly plural, an endless play which can never be nailed down to a single center or meaning. Applications and formulas in writing are cast aside, tossed away for new avenues of approach. Develop your own.
--e. smith sleigh, post structuralism poet and blogger http://bit.ly/iionKS
poetry books include: THESE THINGS ARE A ONE THING
the NATURE series
AN AMERICAN STILL LIFE
http://amzn.to/18773hp