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Important Literary Theories

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Md. Nuruzzaman Moral:
                                           Prominent Structuralists

•   Ferdinand de Saussure
•   Roman Jakobson
•   Claude Lévi-Strauss
•   Louis Althusser
•   Roland Barthes
•   Michel Foucault
•   Jacques Lacan
•   Julia Kristeva
•   Hayden White
•   Jacques Derrida
•   T.S. Kuhn

Md. Nuruzzaman Moral:
                                                        Post-structuralism

Post-structuralism encompasses the intellectual developments of continental philosophers and critical theorists who wrote with tendencies of twentieth-century French philosophy. The prefix "post" refers to the fact that many contributors, such as Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, and Julia Kristeva, rejected structuralism and became quite critical of it. In direct contrast to structuralism's claims of an independent signifier, superior to the signified, post-structuralism views the signifier and signified as inseparable but not united. The Post-structuralist movement is closely related to postmodernism--but the two concepts are not synonymous.
While post-structuralism is difficult to define or summarize, it can be broadly understood as a body of distinct reactions to structuralism. There are two main reasons for this difficulty. First, it rejects definitions that claim to have discovered absolute "truths" or facts about the world.[1] Second, very few thinkers have willingly accepted the label 'post-structuralist'; rather, they have been labeled as such by others. Consequently, no one has felt compelled to construct a "manifesto" of post-structuralism. Indeed, it would be inconsistent with post-structuralist concepts to codify itself in such a way.

Md. Nuruzzaman Moral:
                             Structuralism vs. Post-structuralism

Structuralism was a fashionable movement in France in the 1950s and 1960s, that studied the underlying structures inherent in cultural products (such as texts), and utilizes analytical concepts from linguistics, psychology, anthropology and other fields to understand and interpret those structures. Although the structuralist movement fostered critical inquiry into these structures, it emphasized logical and scientific results. Many structuralists sought to integrate their work into pre-existing bodies of knowledge. This was observed in the work of Ferdinand de Saussure in linguistics, Claude Lévi-Strauss in anthropology, and many early 20th-century psychologists.
The general assumptions of post-structuralism derive from critique of structuralist premises. Specifically, post-structuralism holds that the study of underlying structures is itself culturally conditioned and therefore subject to myriad biases and misinterpretations. To understand an object (e.g. one of the many meanings of a text), it is necessary to study both the object itself, and the systems of knowledge which were coordinated to produce the object. In this way, post-structuralism positions itself as a study of how knowledge is produced.

Md. Nuruzzaman Moral:
                                                            Deconstruction

A major theory associated with Structuralism was binary opposition. This theory proposed that there are certain theoretical and conceptual opposites, often arranged in a hierarchy, which human logic has given to text. Such binary pairs could include Enlightenment/Romantic, male/female, speech/writing, rational/emotional, signifier/signified, symbolic/imaginary.
Post-structuralism rejects the notion of the essential quality of the dominant relation in the hierarchy, choosing rather to expose these relations and the dependency of the dominant term on its apparently subservient counterpart. The only way to properly understand these meanings is to deconstruct the assumptions and knowledge systems which produce the illusion of singular meaning. This act of deconstruction illuminates how male can become female, how speech can become writing, and how rational can become emotional.

Md. Nuruzzaman Moral:
                                                       Existentialism

The philosophers Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche are considered fundamental to the existentialist movement, though neither used the term "existentialism". They predated existentialism by a century.
Existentialism is a philosophical movement which posits that individuals create the meaning and essence of their lives, as opposed to it being created for them by deities or authorities or defined for them by philosophical or theological doctrines.
It emerged as a movement in twentieth-century literature and philosophy, most notably Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche, though it had forerunners in earlier centuries. Fyodor Dostoevsky and Franz Kafka also described existential themes in their literary works. It took explicit form as a philosophical current in Continental philosophy, first in the work of Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers in the 1930s in Germany, and then in the work of Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, and Simone de Beauvoir in the 1940s and 1950s in France. Their work focused on such themes as "dread, boredom, alienation, the absurd, freedom, commitment, and nothingness" as fundamental to human existence. Walter Kaufmann described existentialism as "The refusal to belong to any school of thought, the repudiation of the adequacy of any body of beliefs whatever, and especially of systems, and a marked dissatisfaction with traditional philosophy as superficial, academic, and remote from life".
Although there are some common tendencies amongst "existentialist" thinkers, there are major differences and disagreements among them (most notably the divide between atheistic existentialists like Sartre and theistic existentialists like Tillich); not all of them accept the validity of the term.
  

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