What is Structuralism? How is it possible? And once the structures of
Structuralism have been discovered, how is Poststructuralism possible?
Thus begins Don Palmer's Structuralism and Poststructuralism For
Beginners. If Nobel or Pulitzer ever made a prize for making the most
difficult philosophers and ideas accessible to the greatest number of
people, one of the leading candidates would certainly be Professor Don
Palmer. From his Sartre For Beginners and Kierkegaard For Beginners
to his Looking at Philosophy, author/illustrator Don Palmer has the
magic touch when it comes to translating the most brutally difficult
ideas into language and images that non-specialists can understand.
In its less dramatic versions, writes Palme, structuralism is just a
method of studying language, society, and the works of artists and
novelists. But in its most exuberant form, it is a philosophy, an
overall worldview that provides an account of reality and knowledge.
Poststructuralism is a loosely knit intellectual movement, comprised
mainly of ex-structuralists, who either became dissatisfied with the
theory or felt they could improve it.
Structuralism and Poststructuralism For Beginners is an illustrated
tour through the mysterious landscape of Structuralism and
Poststructuralism. The book's starting point is the linguistic theory of
Ferdinand de Sausser. The book moves on to the anthropologist and
literary critic Claude Lévi-Strauss; the semiologost and literary critic
Roland Barthes; the Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser; the
psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan; the deconstructionist Jacques Derrida.
Learn among other things, why structuralists say:
- Reality is composed of not Things, but Relationships
- Every object is both a presence and an absence
- The total system is present in each of its parts
- The parts are more real than the whole
The book concludes by examining the postmodern obsession with language
and with the radical claim of the disappearance of the individual -
obsessions that unite the work of all these theorists.
