Post-Structuralism

Question 1

the heart of the difference between structuralism and poststructuralism.

Answer 1

Language

Question 2

Logocentrism

Answer 2

The trust in the combination of presence and language. Presences is the bases of the las piece of true language that one has and language allows one to convey that knowledge to the outside world.

Question 3

Discourse

Answer 3

Social language that take place in a particular historical moment, that is made of a number of ideologies

Question 4

the bottom language of discourse.

Answer 4

Power

Question 5

Meaning is the product of

Answer 5

Difference and it is also always subject to a process of deferral difference.

Question 6

True meaning is always

Answer 6

Deferred

Question 7

Setting up a centre automatically creates

Answer 7

a hierarchical structure: the central is more important than the marginal.

Question 8

Deconstruction

Answer 8

undertakes to bring to light the tensions between the central and the marginal text.
Meaning that we take the text, the center of the text there is an ideology that is dominant, and in the margins of the text there are the forms of resistance.
We criticize the center ideology (or dominant ideology) in order to contemplate the periphery ideologies.

Question 9

The oppositional term is a condition for subversion: to analyze and dismantle binary oppositions

Answer 9

means to decentre the priviledge term, to show that both terms only exist because of the difference.

Question 10

Deconstruction

Answer 10

Examines the ways in which our experience is determined by ideologies of which we are unaware because they are “built into” our language.

Question 11

language is not the reliable tool of communication we believe it to be, but rather a… (Derrida)

Answer 11

… but rather a fluid, ambiguous domain of complex experience in which ideologies program us without our being aware of them.

Question 12

What structuralism calls the signified is

Answer 12

a chain of signifiers.

Question 13

language is nonreferential, structuralism explanation

Answer 13

because it doesn’t refer to things in the world but only to our concepts of things in the world.

Question 14

Language is nonreferential, post-structuralism explanation

Answer 14

it refers neither to things in the world nor to our concepts of things but only to the play of signifiers of which language itself consists.

Question 15

2 characteristics of language

Answer 15

(1) its play of signifiers continually defers, or postpones, meaning, and (2) the meaning it seems to have is the result of the differences by which we distinguish one signifier from another. He combines the French words for “to defer” and “to differ” to coin the word différance

Question 16

The only meaning language can have

Answer 16

Différance

Question 17

Bricolage

Answer 17

Stretch language into new forms of thinking

Question 18

language is wholly ideological

Answer 18

it consists entirely of the numerous conflicting, dynamic ideologies—or systems of beliefs and values—operating at any given point in time in any given culture.

Question 19

Difference of binary oppositions between structuralism and deconstructivism

Answer 19

Deconstructivism analyzes binary oppositions through heriarchies. That is, one term in the pair is always privileged, or considered superior to the other.

Question 20

Language is constantly overflowing with implications, associations, and contradictions that reflect the implications, associations, and contra‑ dictions of the ideologies of which it is formed.

Answer 20

Yes

Question 21

Because it is through language that a culture’s

Answer 21

Ideologies are passed on

Question 22

Ground of being of the culture

Answer 22

Language, but that ground is not out of play: it is itself as dynamic, evolving, problematical

Question 23

Logocentrism

Answer 23

the concepts themselves remain stable; it places at the center (centric) of its understanding of the world a concept (logos) that organizes and explains the world for us while remaining outside of the world it organizes and explains. Western philoshophy’s greatest illusion.

Question 24

no concept is beyond

Answer 24

the dynamic instability of language, which disseminates (as a flower scatters its seeds on the wind) an infinite number of possible meanings with each written or spoken utterance.

Question 25

discourse

Answer 25

an infinite number of vantage points from which to view the existence, and each of these vantage points has a language of its own,

Question 26

Conception (what we think) precedes

Answer 26

perception (what we experience through our senses) and how our expectations, beliefs, and values determine the way we experience our world.

Question 27

if language is the ground of being, then the world

Answer 27

is infinite text, that is, an infinite chain of signifiers always in play.

Question 28

Because human beings are constituted by language

Answer 28

they, too, are texts.

Question 29

The self‑image of a stable identity that many of us have is really

Answer 29

just a comforting self‑delusion, which we produce in collusion with our culture, for culture, too, wants to see itself as stable and coherent when in reality it is highly unstable and fragmented.

Question 30

We dont have an identity because

Answer 30

the word identity implies that we consist of one, singular self, but in fact we are multiple and fragmented, consisting at any moment of any number of conflicting beliefs, desires, fears, anxieties, and intentions.

Question 31

In literature, meaning is created by

Answer 31

the reader in the act of reading

Question 32

Two main purposes in deconstructing a literary text

Answer 32

(1) to reveal the text’s undecidability and/or (2) to reveal the complex operations of the ideologies of which the text is constructed.