Mock 8 – Structuralism, Post-structuralism & Deconstruction (Part 2)

Classical Marxism is a universal theory of history (class struggle, historical materialism), so A is false. R is true: Lyotard defines the postmodern as 'incredulity toward metanarratives', Marxism included.

Note: Some answer keys give option 2; the logic of the statements supports option 4.

In 'DissemiNation' (Nation and Narration, 1990) Bhabha argues the nation is narrated in a double time — the pedagogical (fixed tradition) and the performative (lived repetition) — which splits nationalist discourse and makes it ambivalent. The nation is neither homogeneous nor fixed.

Barthes distinguishes three levels: functions (Propp, Bremond), actions (characters as actants, Greimas) and narration (Todorov's discourse level).

For Baudrillard (Simulacra and Simulation, 1981) the simulacrum is a copy without an original: signs no longer represent a real but manufacture a 'hyperreal' that passes for reality.

In Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (1975), minor literature has three features: deterritorialization of language, immediate political connection, and collective value.

For Foucault, discourses are material practices that produce the objects and subjects they speak of; the Reason explains why discourses count as practices rooted in social reality.

In Revolution in Poetic Language (1974) Kristeva borrows Plato's chora for the pre-linguistic, pre-Oedipal 'receptacle': a non-expressive totality formed by the drives, mobile and without fixed identity, preceding the sign and the symbolic order.

Foucault's chapter 'Panopticism' in Discipline and Punish (1975) turns Bentham's prison design into a model of modern disciplinary power.

Bakhtin's heteroglossia ('Discourse in the Novel'); Williams's 'structures of feeling' (Preface to Film, 1954; Marxism and Literature, 1977); Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930); Foucault's theory of discourse.

Bakhtin's 'Discourse in the Novel' (1934–35; The Dialogic Imagination) defines the novel by heteroglossia — the orchestration of many social languages and voices.

Lyotard defines the postmodern as 'incredulity toward metanarratives' (The Postmodern Condition, 1979); Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation (1981) is a key text; Jameson argues pastiche ('blank parody') replaces parody (1984). Said is a postcolonial, not a postmodern, theorist, and the two movements are not mutually dependent.

Orientalism appeared in 1978. Said reads the Orient as a Western discursive formation (Foucault), with its own 'imaginative geography', and the book founded colonial discourse analysis. He insists on the author's imprint, rejecting the 'death of the author'.

Poststructuralism grows out of structuralism, radicalising Saussure's view of the sign. But it attacks humanism and the centred subject, and it makes language even more central. R inverts both points.

In 'Myth Today' (Mythologies, 1957) Barthes reads myth as a second-order sign system that turns history into nature, so that myth is 'depoliticized speech'.

Barthes (1971) reverses A, B and D: the Text is the methodological field, the work is the computable object held in the hand, and it is the work that is caught in filiation. The Text is irreducibly plural, while the work is consumed.

Interpellation explains how ideological state apparatuses recruit subjects. Deconstruction is a reading of the instability of meaning in texts, so the two are unrelated.

Barthes's French first editions: Le degré zéro de l'écriture (1953), Mythologies (1957), L'empire des signes (1970), Le plaisir du texte (1973).

Simulacra and hyperreality (Simulacra and Simulation, 1981) are Baudrillard's. Bricolage is Lévi-Strauss's, the rhizome Deleuze and Guattari's, and the dispositif Foucault's.

Habermas's The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962) traces bourgeois Öffentlichkeit through coffee-houses, salons and the press.

Saussure lectured at the University of Geneva (1906–11); Bally and Sechehaye compiled the Course from students' notes (1916).

Course (1916) → The Implied Reader (1972) → The Pleasure of the Text (1973) → Structuralist Poetics (1975) → The Pursuit of Signs (1981).

Note: Option 2 is printed 'B, D, E, A, C' in some versions; Iser (1972) precedes Barthes (1973).

Jameson (1981); Barthes (1973); Wittig (1992); Joseph Carroll (2004).

Per the NTA key, both are false.

Note: Key doubtful: both statements echo standard accounts of poststructuralist genre theory (e.g. John Frow, Genre), which would support option 1.

Bultmann's Entmythologisierung (1941) reinterprets the New Testament's mythic world-picture in existential terms.

The Yale school of Deconstruction and Criticism (1979) was de Man, Hartman, Miller and Bloom, with Derrida as visitor.