The Post Structuralism Debate
The Emperor Redressed (available in the McIntyre Library) is a collection of papers originally presented at the University of Alabama's Eighteenth Symposium on English and American Literature. One of these papers is Frederick Crew's "The End of the Poststructuralist Era". The thesis of this paper is that while post-structuralism has yielded some interesting insights, it is fated to fail because post-structural readings of texts yield circular, un-insightful information.
Post-structuralists have been criticized for their political affiliations. In particular, they have been criticized for the apparent contradiction between their rejection of universal values and their involvement in value-based political action. This link goes to a defense of post-structuralism activism in politics.
An interesting and controversial aspect of post-structuralism is its claim to a new form of logic. This new logic allows words to have multiple conflicting meanings, or mean the same thing as its opposite. Is the logic behind post structuralism and deconstruction valid?
This set of criticisms is not so much an attack on post-structuralism or deconstruction itself, but on the scholars who support these theories. The academics cited in this section believe that post-structuralism and deconstructionism have enjoyed an unwarranted amount of populari ty. In addition, and due to the poststructuralists stifling discussion, there was not as much debate about the merits of post-structuralism as there should have been.
Another paper given at the University of Alabama's Eighteenth Symposium on English and American Literature was David Lehman's "Deconstruction After the Fall". Lehman discusses the critical and public reception to deconstruction.
Post structuralism holds that language is out of the control of the author, that meaning cannot be effectively transferred through language. Yet people communicate every day, and are not bothered by the "subconscious" of language. Is language really as subversive as poststructuralists would have us believe?
Post structuralist methods vs. scientific, rational, and empirical methods.
Poststructuralist claim to have found different ways of reaching truth. Are poststructuralist methods compatible with scientific methods? Do the poststructuralist's claims to truth derive from a rational or empirical method? Should they?
List of sources cited above and additional links that either defend or 'deconstruct' post structuralism and deconstruction.
