Main tenets and concepts of the Post-structuralist theory
Structuralist movement: based in France, synthesized the ideas of Marx, Freud and de Saussure. Post-structuralism: argue against the “absolutism” and totalizing concepts of Structuralism; it’s a way of understanding the world by studying the relationship between language and being. Nothing outside the text.
This doesn’t mean a denial of the material world, but that the particularity of the objects depends on the arrangement of a discursive field. All meaning is textual and intertextual. Most important representative: Foucault (French philosopher and historian) Shared some views with structuralists, but didn’t believe that there were specific essential structures that could explain the human condition, nor did he think it possible to review and study discourse from an objective point of view. This view opposes any kind of totalizing concepts, some of the main tenets:
The perception of the self plays a decisive role in one’s interpretation of meaning. To study a text or discourse the reader or hearer must understand the way in which this discourse is related to the writer’s/speaker’s individual self because each individual is made up taking into account gender, professions, race, class, etc.A text has not a single purpose or meaning, the author’s intended meaning is secondary to the meaning perceived by the hearer/reader; new and individual purposes are created by each individual when referring to a particular text. Language and our experience of the world is dynamic, the concepts and the words we use to represent these concepts are constantly changing their meaning. E.g. the meaning of “web” before the existence of Internet was associated with spiders. The meaning of a text varies depending on the variables related to the reader’s identity. None of all the possible interpretations is considered to be the right one, all of them contribute to a better understanding of the text in question. One of the main failures of this view is to present an explicit method for the analysis of real cases of text or social interaction-in-context.
Variation Analysis
Concerned with the variation and changes observed in language within different speech communities. Most prominent figure within this approach: Labov: sees language as an instrument of social communication in which changes vary according to a diversity of human needs and activities. Variation must be studied from different perspectives like the syntactical or phonological level. Something we must bear in mind is that certain limitations (constraints) must be applied in the overall information structure, over its elements and over the way those particular forms are used. For variationists it is important that the linguistic analysis they carry out is done by collecting samples of authentic speech data. People resort to the use of the vernacular when they give an account about the events of their lives, for this reason variationist make use of sociolinguistic interviews to collect speech samples. The vernacular is defined by Labov as the variety of language acquired in pre-adolescent years and that is used by speakers without paying much attention to the way language is used.One of variationists’ main issues is to search and compare for the information structures that predominate in discourse. Some criteria for the definition of narrative are:Temporal structure
Crucial for the assignment of reference time, although depending on the type of text we are dealing with it is not relevant, for example in a shopping list.Descriptive structures
Central issue of narratives, since a narrative descriptive orientation may introduce the narrative action itself, or it may be embedded within the complicating action.Evaluative structures
Important in the construction of narratives, they can be more or less necessary depending on the type of text, e.g. required in stories but optional in recipes.Explain Labov’s approach to the analysis of narrative. Provide an example of a short narrative and analyze its elements.
Following Labov and Waletzky, a narrative is a particular unit in discourse which contains smaller units that enclose particular semantic and syntactic properties. The different functions in the story are completed by the information held in the different sections of a narrative. The abstract, the orientation, the complicating action, the evaluation, the resolution and the coda are element we can find in a narrative, although not all narratives contain the six of them. For Labov a recapitulation of experience must follow the same order as the original events to be considered a narrative, and all complicating action clauses as well as resolution clauses must be sequential. An essential concept within narrative analysis, especially narratives of personal experience is reportability, which has to do with the fact that when telling a narrative the reporter must hold the floor longer, also the story must be interesting enough for the audience in order to justify its telling. If this isn’t accomplished there will be a violation of social norm on behalf of the speaker because of his/her unjustified claim. The notion of credibility is another important concept and if it isn’t achieved when telling a narrative of personal experience the narrative will be considered to have failed and no attention will be paid to the removal of the position of the speaker. The issue of causality has to do with the fact that all narratives require that the explanation of events is done by a series of explicit or implicit causal relations. The concept of objectivity is related to the point of view of the narrator, this is normally an unconscious process. An objective event is the one that has become known by the narrator through sense experience. A subjective event, on the contrary, is the one that the narrator knows through memory, emotional reaction, or internal sensation. Example of narrative: