Psychoanalytic Criticism and Post-Structuralism and Deconstruction

ALVAREZ,IVETTE,M JUAREZ,JENISSA,MARIA SILVA MANCHEGO,MICHAEL TRIGOURA,DELSINA,

Psychoanalytic Criticism
Psychoanalytic criticism is an approach to criticism or a critical technique that applies the principles, theories and practices of psychoanalysis to literature, both in the analysis of the work and of the author

Jenissa Juarez

Relation to Freud
Psychoanalytic criticism is largely based on the work of Sigmund Freud. Through the characters, critics attempt to identify Freudian concepts described in his Interpretation of Dreams, such as Oedipus complex and the Id ego and superego.

Jenissa Juarez

Freudian Concepts
Id: The unconscious part of our personality. The most primal part, driven by the pleasure principle. Ego: Driven by the rationality principle. Seeks to fulfill the wishes of the id in a realistic manner Super-Ego: Driven by the morality principle. This is the part that reins in the Id by guilt. Works in a socially appropriate manner
Jenissa Juarez

Jacques Lacan
Jacques Lacan was not as interested in psychoanalytical criticism as he was in how the writing might be used to illustrate a psychoanalytic method. He treated the unconscious mind as a language, that dreams where a form of discourse and not a symptom of repression that Freud believed. In this way he believed that we can analyze dreams to better understand literature.

Jenissa Juarez

Carl Jung and Norman Holland

Carl Jung was a student of Freud who branched off with what he called the collective unconscious of the human race. Jung worked with anthropologists to create anew field called myth criticism and archetype analysis.
Jenissa Juarez

Norman Holland focused more on the reader than the literature. Through his theories a form of reader response criticism. This theory states that we read literature selectively, projecting our own inner desires onto the works unconsciously.

Psychoanalytical Critics
Treat texts like dreams. Look at the characters as a case study to see any hidden motives or to analyze psychological makeup Follow Freudian techniques to uncover any Oedipal conflicts or imagery of repression, displacement or condensation.

Jenissa Juarez

Post Structuralism
Post structuralism is said to be the most complex theory to understand. It is defined logically as the position of argument, which does not allow the possibility of truth. A word is inert and the true definition is never reached. There is never one meaning but an excess of. It asserts that we can not trust language to tell the truth, that the very base of truth are unreliable and the universe becomes unraveled and de-centered.

Reading By: Delsina Trigoura

 It also concerned with the power structures, power, and how the elements contribute to maintain structures to enforce hierarchy. Post structural theory carries implications far beyond literary criticism.

It is also said to have developed in Europe and tied to a movement against modernist ideas and western religion beliefs.
Post structural theory strikes the very center of philosophy.

Reading By: Ivette M. Alvarez

Literary Influences in Poststructuralism:

Jacques Derrida
Most influential papers: Structure, Sign and Play in the discourse of the human sciences

Reading By: Delsina Trigoura

 In literature Derriba challenged the reader, that if words are derived from one another and words can mean an endless amount of things then what is really being said? if everything is connected then there is no logic, and no meaning. Derrida first presented Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Science in 1966 in John Hopkins University. He challenged structuralisms most basic ideas:
Perhaps something has occurred in the history of the concept of structure that could be called an 'event,' if this loaded word did not entail a meaning which it is precisely the function of structural-or structuralist-thought to reduce or to suspect. But let me use the term event anyway, employing it with caution and as if in quotation marks. In this sense, this event will have the exterior form of a rupture and a redoubling

Reading By: Ivette M. Alvarez

Rowland Barthes
Influential papers: The Death of the Author

Roland states that even at times authors do not even know what they are trying to say and so the only thing that is important is the relationship between the book and the reader.
Reading By: Ivette M. Alvarez

Friedrich Nietzsche
One of the early pioneer of Post-Structural theory.

Wrote his essay On Truth and Lies in an Extra-moral Sense (1873)

Rejects our knowledge making and language as a reliable system of communication:
The various languages, juxtaposed, show that words are never concerned with truth, never with adequate expression...

Essentially, post-structuralism holds that we cannot trust the sign = signifier + signified formula, that there is a breakdown of certainty between sign/signifier, which leaves language systems hopelessly inadequate for relaying meaning so that we are (returning to Derrida) in eternal freeplay or instability.

Deconstruction
Derrida thought that all text contained a legacy of these expectations, and as a result of this, these texts could be re-taken with an responsiveness of the hierarchies implicit in language. Michael Silva Manchego Derrida does not think that we can reach an end point of interpretation, a truth. One consequence of deconstruction is that certainty in textual analyses becomes impossible. There may be competing interpretations, but there is no uninterested way one could evaluate the validity of these competing explanations.. writing.

 It is the language or 'texts' are not a natural reflection of the world. Text structures our interpretation of the world.

Derrida thinks that language shapes us: texts create a clearing that we understand as reality. Derrida sees the history of western thought as based on opposition: good vs. evil mind vs. matter, man vs. woman, speech vs. writing.

Michael Silva Manchego

Below is an example, adapted off some language free play and a

simple form of deconstruction:

Michael Silva Manchego

Time (noun) flies (verb) like an arrow (adverb clause) = Time passes quickly. Time (verb) flies (object) like an arrow (adverb clause) = Get out your stopwatch and time the speed of flies as you would time an arrow's flight. Time flies (noun) like (verb) an arrow (object) = Time flies are fond of arrows (or at least of one particular arrow).