Post structuralism evolved in the late 1960s as a critique of structuralist theory. The basis of post structuralist theories lie in the belief of the inadequacy of language. Jacques Derrida's theory of differance proposed that meaning is inherently unstable due to the play of signs within language. This is because that within language, a signifier and a signified exist which provide the meaning of the word or phrase. At its most basic level, the signifier may be the letters F-I-S-H, which provide the reader with the signified, the word FISH, which in turn provides a mental image of fish. However the reader's image of fish may vary from a live goldfish or shark to a freshly caught trout or rows of John Dory in a fishmonger's window. Thus the interpretation that the reader lends to the signifiers within the text is based upon the reader's experiences. These experiences may be derived from prior knowledge which the reader has previously attained whether it be from a book, film, television or whatever. Thus intertextuality is viewed by the post strucuralists as essential to the interpretation of the text, and as such exists as a strength rather than a weakness.

Deconstruction, based on the work of Derrida aims to show that any and every text inevitably undermines its own claims to determine a definte meaning. Thus the lack of meaning sabotages any attempts to form a definite conclusion within a text. This raises the concept of the lack of closure within the text. This in turn emphasized the role of the reader in the process of determining meaning in text, which led Roland Barthes to propose the four main points that comprise The Death of the Author (1968).

  1. That the concept of the author (as an authority) has been made obselete by the power of the reader in the interpretations of a text.
  2. That there are two basic experiences to be had in reading, Plaisir and Jouissance.
  3. That texts may be either Lisible or Scriptible ('readerly' or 'writerly').
  4. That with the use of particular codes, a text can be analysed and interpreted as 'readerly' or 'writerly'.
In Elements of Semiology, Barthes also proposed the concept of a 'metalanguage', which is a higher order language that is used to explain a lower order language. For example, a second-order language is used to explain a first-order language.

However, deconstruction exists as the most influential feature of post strucuralism because it dictates a new kind of reading which is the actual application of post structuralist theories. In The Critical Difference (1981), Barbara Johnson suggests that: "deconstruction is not synonymous with 'destruction', however. It is in fact much closer to the original meaning of the word analysis itself, which etymologically means 'to undo'- a virtual synonym for 'to deconstruct'. The deconstruction of a text does not proceed by random doubt or arbitrary subversion, but by the careful teasing out of warring forces of signification within the text itself. If anything is destroyed in a deconstructive reading, it is not the text, but the claim to unequivocal domination of one mode of signifying over another. A deconstructive reading is a reading which analyses the specificity of a text's critical difference from itself." The analysis of a text reveals what Derrida called 'dissemination' and 'trace'. Dissemination is used to describe the scattering or dispersal of meaning, whilst trace represents the absence of a signifier in a sign.Derrida's deconstructive theory displaces the traditional 'violent hierarchy' of speech over writing by suggesting that they are both forms of one science of language, grammatology.

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