Mock 7 – Structuralism, Post-structuralism & Deconstruction (Part 1)

Per the key, following Peter Barry's Beginning Theory, which treats the two as near-synonyms and traces the turn through Barthes and Derrida.

Note: Deconstruction is chiefly Derrida's; R is a simplification.

Saussure says 'symbol' has been used for the signifier, and he rejects it because symbols, like the scales of justice, are never wholly arbitrary.

Baudrillard (Simulacra and Simulation; The Gulf War Did Not Take Place).

Ecocriticism; Lyotard; Mulvey; narratology and film theory.

The 'trace of the Other' comes from Emmanuel Levinas's ethics ('The Trace of the Other', 1963). Derrida acknowledges borrowing it from Levinas (and also from Freud's memory-trace and Heidegger) in Of Grammatology. The question names Lacan, which appears to be a slip in the paper; in any case, Levinas is the source of the phrase.

Note: The exam wording says 'Lacan'; the borrowing is usually attributed to Derrida. The answer, Levinas, is unaffected.

The line is from Michel Foucault's 'What is an Author?' (1969), which replaces the individual author with the 'author-function' — a way discourse is classified, owned and controlled. It answers Barthes's 'The Death of the Author' (1967).

Bakhtin's dialogism; Foucault's The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (1966); Barthes's lisible/scriptible distinction in S/Z (1970); Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams (1899/1900).

Bloom et al., Deconstruction and Criticism (1979) → Kermode, An Appetite for Poetry (1989) → Bloom, The Western Canon (1994) → Satya Mohanty, Literary Theory and the Claims of History (1997) → C. James Trotman (ed.), Multiculturalism: Roots and Realities (2002).

'Il n'y a pas de hors-texte' is from Derrida's Of Grammatology (1967), in his reading of Rousseau: there is no meaning outside chains of signification (often mistranslated as a denial of the real world).

Modernism (c. 1890–1940) broke with inherited forms, responded to upheavals in thought (Darwin, Marx, Freud, the war) and shook liberal-humanist faith in a stable self. Reviving classical scholarship belongs to the Renaissance; questioning logocentrism belongs to post-structuralism.

Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism (1950) → Talal Asad (ed.), Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter (1973) → Said, Orientalism (1978) → Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination (English, 1981) → Bhabha (ed.), Nation and Narration (1990).

Note: Marked dropped in some keys; option 1 is the correct order.

Course in General Linguistics (1916): synchronic study of langue as a system of differences.

Note: The source omits option 3; Edward Sapir is added.

Per the key, the Marxist narrative of emancipation through socialism.

Note: The Hegelian narrative is also one Lyotard rejects; the key is option 4.

The four essays (1975; English 1981) treat the novel as dialogic and heteroglot, with language living and socially charged.

Bakhtin; Sedgwick (Between Men, 1985); Rumi's Masnavi; morology from Greek moros, 'foolish'.

Lacan's triad is the Imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real.

Mythologies (1957) → Écrits (1966) → Of Grammatology (1967) → The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969) → The Postmodern Condition (1979).

Per the key, the Marxist narrative of emancipation through socialism. Lyotard names both the speculative (Hegelian) and the emancipatory narratives as having lost credibility.

Note: The Hegelian narrative is also among those Lyotard rejects; the key is option 3.

Williams and Orrom (1954); Marcuse (1964); Jameson (1991); Hoggart (1957).

Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (1976); Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944); Walker, In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens (1983). The performative goes back to J. L. Austin, and ISA is Althusser's.

Benjamin (1892) → Bakhtin (1895) → Beauvoir (1908) → Barthes (1915) → Baudrillard (1929).

Iser of the Konstanz School (1972; 1976): the reader fills the text's gaps.

In 'Structure, Sign, and Play' (1966) Derrida takes Lévi-Strauss's bricoleur, who uses whatever tools are at hand, and argues that every discourse is bricolage, since no concept has a pure origin.

Said's contrapuntal reading (Culture and Imperialism, 1993) reads metropolitan texts with the colonial history they suppress — Antigua behind Mansfield Park — exposing their unspoken imperial investments. 'Anxiety of influence' is Bloom's.

In Discipline and Punish (1975) Bentham's prison, where inmates may be watched at any moment and so police themselves, becomes the diagram of modern disciplinary power.