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 MEG – 05/2020-21
1. What do you think Aristotle meant when he said, ‘pleasure proper to tragedy’? Explain
with reference to the essays in your course. 20

As the great period of Athenian drama drew to an end at the beginning of the 4th century BCE,
Athenian philosophers began to analyze its content and formulate its structure. In the thought
of Plato (c. 427–347 BCE), the history of the criticism of tragedy began with speculation on the
role of censorship. To Plato (in the dialogue on the Laws) the state was the noblest work of art,
a representation (mimēsis) of the fairest and best life. He feared the tragedians’ command of
the expressive resources of language, which might be used to the detriment of worthwhile
institutions. He feared, too, the emotive effect of poetry, the Dionysian element that is at the
very basis of tragedy. Therefore, he recommended that the tragedians submit their works to
the rulers, for approval, without which they could not be performed. It is clear that tragedy, by
nature exploratory, critical, independent, could not live under such a regimen. Plato
is answered, in effect and perhaps intentionally, by Aristotle’s Poetics. Aristotle defends the
purgative power of tragedy and, in direct contradiction to Plato, makes moral ambiguity the
essence of tragedy. The tragic hero must be neither a villain nor a virtuous man but a “character
between these two extremes,…a man who is not eminently good and just, yet whose
misfortune is brought about not by vice or depravity, but by some error or frailty [hamartia].”
The effect on the audience will be similarly ambiguous. A perfect tragedy, he says, should
imitate actions that excite “pity and fear.” He uses Sophocles’ Oedipus the King as a paradigm.
Near the beginning of the play, Oedipus asks how his stricken city (the counterpart of Plato’s
state) may cleanse itself, and the word he uses for the purifying action is a form of the
word catharsis. The concept of catharsis provides Aristotle with his reconciliation with Plato, a
means by which to satisfy the claims of both ethics and art. “Tragedy,” says Aristotle, “is an
imitation [mimēsis] of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude…through
pity and fear effecting the proper purgation [catharsis] of these emotions.” Ambiguous means
may be employed, Aristotle maintains in contrast to Plato, to a virtuous and purifying end.

To establish the basis for a reconciliation between ethical and artistic demands, Aristotle insists
that the principal element in the structure of tragedy is not character but plot. Since the
erring protagonist is always in at least partial opposition to the state, the importance of tragedy
lies not in the character but in the enlightening event. “Most important of all,” Aristotle said, “is
the structure of the incidents. For tragedy is an imitation not of men but of an action and of life,
and life consists in action, and its end is a mode of action, not a quality.” Aristotle considered
the plot to be the soul of a tragedy, with character in second place. The goal of tragedy is not
suffering but the knowledge that issues from it, as the denouement issues from a plot. The
most powerful elements of emotional interest in tragedy, according to Aristotle, are reversal of
intention or situation (peripeteia) and recognition scenes (anagnōrisis), and each is most
effective when it is coincident with the other. In Oedipus, for example, the messenger who
brings Oedipus news of his real parentage, intending to allay his fears, brings about a sudden

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reversal of his fortune, from happiness to misery, by compelling him to recognize that his wife
is also his mother.

Later critics found justification for their own predilections in the authority of Greek drama and
Aristotle. For example, the Roman poet Horace, in his Ars poetica (Art of Poetry), elaborated
the Greek tradition of extensively narrating offstage events into a dictum
on decorum forbidding events such as Medea’s butchering of her sons from being performed
on stage. And where Aristotle had discussed tragedy as a separate genre, superior
to epic poetry, Horace discussed it as a genre with a separate style, again with considerations
of decorum foremost. A theme for comedy may not be set forth in verses of tragedy; each style
must keep to the place allotted it.

On the basis of this kind of stylistic distinction, the Aeneid, the epic poem of Virgil, Horace’s
contemporary, is called a tragedy by the fictional Virgil in Dante’s Divine Comedy, on the
grounds that the Aeneid treats only of lofty things. Dante calls his own poem a comedy partly
because he includes “low” subjects in it. He makes this distinction in his De vulgari
eloquentia (1304–05; “Of Eloquence in the Vulgar”) in which he also declares the subjects fit for
the high, tragic style to be salvation, love, and virtue. Despite the presence of these subjects in
this poem, he calls it a comedy because his style of language is “careless and humble” and
because it is in the vernacular tongue rather than Latin. Dante makes a further distinction:

Dante’s emphasis on the outcome of the struggle rather than on the nature of the struggle is
repeated by Chaucer and for the same reason: their belief in the providential nature of human
destiny. Like Dante, he was under the influence of De consolatione philosophiae (Consolation of
Philosophy), the work of the 6th-century Roman philosopher Boethius that he translated
into English. Chaucer considered Fortune to be beyond the influence of the human will. In
his Canterbury Tales, he introduces “The Monk’s Tale” by defining tragedy as “a certeyn storie…
/ of him that stood in greet prosperitee, / And is y-fallen out of heigh degree / Into miserie, and
endeth wrecchedly.” Again, he calls his Troilus and Criseyde a tragedy because, in the words of
Troilus, “all that comth, comth by necessitee… / That forsight of divine purveyaunce / Hath seyn
alwey me to forgon Criseyde.”

2. Write short notes on the following: 8 x 5 = 4 0

a) Rasa and Dhvani

There is no denying the difficulty of expressing in words the meanings behind complex
emotions. If they cannot be conveyed because they are personal and private, then how are
they conveyed when they are neither entirely private nor personal, as in the case of generalized
emotions, or the rasa experience? In Ānandavardhana’s Dhvanyāloka, we find a theory of
suggestion (dhvani) which can be expanded beyond poetics to account for the evocative nature
of emotion outside of all other modes of expression. The result of dhvani in art experiences is

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the manifestation of aestheticized emotions (rasadhvani). When language serves art, it neither
negates nor dispenses with linguistic apprehension. Rather, it delivers more than language can:
the ineffable essence of the subject who experiences love, compassion, grief, the comic, and
more, including quietude. I argue the question of the sentient subject is conveyed all the better
in aesthetic suggestion, precisely because whether or not an artistic construction makes use of
linguistic devices, the arts, whether they be theater, dance, or poetry, defies the confines of
language. The ineffable subject is made tangible, in ordinary as well as extraordinary ways.

b) Gynocriticism

A concept introduced by Elaine Showalter in Towards a Feminist Poetics gynocriticism refers to

a kind of criticism with woman as writer/producer of textual meaning, as against woman as
reader (feminist critique). Being concerned with the specificity of women’s writings (gynotexts)
and women’s experiences, it focuses on female subjectivity, female language and female
literary career, and attempts to construct a female framework for the analysis of literature.

Gynocritics are primarily engaged in identifying distinctly feminine subject matter (domesticity,
gestation) in the literature written by women, uncovering the history of female literary
tradition, depicting that there is a feminine mode of experience and subjectivity in thinking and
perceiving the self and the world , and specifying traits of “woman’s language”, a distinctively
feminine style of speech and writing. Some of the gynocritical texts include Patricia Meyer
Spacks‘ The Female Imagination, Ellen Moers‘ Literary Women, Elaine Showalter’s A Literature
of their Own and Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic, which
elucidates the anxiety of authorship that arises from the notion that literary creativity is an
exclusive male prerogative, and it is this anxiety that creates a counter figure for the idealised
woman, the mad woman (modelled on Bertha Rochester in Jane Eyre). Gynocriticism was
criticised for essentialism.

c) 'The 'Other'

In phenomenology, the terms the Other and the Constitutive Other identify the other human
being, in his and her differences from the Self, as being a cumulative, constituting factor in
the self-image of a person; as acknowledgement of being real; hence, the Other is dissimilar to
and the opposite of the Self, of Us, and of the Same. The Constitutive Other is the relation
between the personality (essential nature) and the person (body) of a human being; the
relation of essential and superficial characteristics of personal identity that corresponds to the
relationship between opposite, but correlative, characteristics of the Self, because the
difference is inner-difference, within the Self.
The condition and quality of Otherness, the characteristics of the Other, is the state of being
different from and alien to the social identity of a person and to the identity of the Self. In
the discourse of philosophy, the term Otherness identifies and refers to the characteristics

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of Who? and What? of the Other, which are distinct and separate from the Symbolic order of
things; from the Real (the authentic and unchangeable); from the æsthetic (art, beauty, taste);
from political philosophy; from social norms and social identity; and from the Self. Therefore,
the condition of Otherness is a person's non-conformity to and with the social norms of society;
and Otherness is the condition of disenfranchisement (political exclusion), effected either by
the State or by the social institutions (e.g. the professions) invested with the corresponding
socio-political power. Therefore, the imposition of Otherness alienates the person labelled as
"the Other" from the centre of society, and places him or her at the margins of society, for
being the Other.
The term Othering describes the reductive action of labelling and defining a person as
a subaltern native, as someone who belongs to the socially subordinate category of the Other.
The practice of Othering excludes persons who do not fit the norm of the social group, which is
a version of the Self; likewise, in human geography, the practice of othering persons means to
exclude and displace them from the social group to the margins of society, where mainstream
social norms do not apply to them, for being the Other.

d) Postmodernism

Postmodernism is a broad movement that developed in the mid- to late 20th century
across philosophy, the arts, architecture, and criticism, marking a departure from modernism.
The term has been more generally applied to describe a historical era said to follow after
modernity and the tendencies of this era.
Postmodernism is generally defined by an attitude of skepticism, irony, or rejection toward
what it describes as the grand narratives and ideologies associated with modernism, often
criticizing Enlightenment rationality and focusing on the role of ideology in maintaining political
or economic power. Postmodern thinkers frequently describe knowledge claims and value
systems as contingent or socially-conditioned, describing them as products of political,
historical, or cultural discourses and hierarchies. Common targets of postmodern criticism
include universalist ideas of objective reality, morality, truth, human
nature, reason, science, language, and social progress. Accordingly, postmodern thought is
broadly characterized by tendencies to self-consciousness, self-
referentiality, epistemological and moral relativism, pluralism, and irreverence.
Postmodern critical approaches gained purchase in the 1980s and 1990s, and have been
adopted in a variety of academic and theoretical disciplines, including cultural
studies, philosophy of science, economics, linguistics, architecture, feminist theory, and literary
criticism, as well as art movements in fields such as literature, contemporary art, and music.
Postmodernism is often associated with schools of thought such as deconstruction, post-
structuralism, and institutional critique, as well as philosophers such as Jean-François
Lyotard, Jacques Derrida, and Fredric Jameson.

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Criticisms of postmodernism are intellectually diverse and include arguments that
postmodernism promotes obscurantism, is meaningless, and that it adds nothing to analytical
or empirical knowledge.

e) New Historicism

New historicism, a form of literary theory which aims to understand intellectual

history through literature, and literature through its cultural context, follows the 1950s field
of history of ideas and refers to itself as a form of "Cultural Poetics". It first developed in the
1980s, primarily through the work of the critic and University of California, Berkeley English
professor Stephen Greenblatt, and gained widespread influence in the 1990s. Greenblatt
coined the term new historicism when he "collected a bunch of essays and then, out of a kind
of desperation to get the introduction done, he wrote that the essays represented something
called a 'new historicism'".
Harold Aram Veeser, introducing an anthology of essays, The New Historicism (1989) noted
some key assumptions that continually reappear in new historicism:

1. that every expressive act is embedded in a network of material practices;

2. that every act of unmasking, critique and opposition uses the tools it condemns and
risks falling prey to the practice it exposes;
3. that literary and non-literary "texts" circulate inseparably;
4. that no discourse, imaginative or archival, gives access to unchanging truths, nor
expresses inalterable human nature;
5. ... that a critical method and a language adequate to describe culture under capitalism
participate in the economy they describe.

In its historicism and in its political interpretations, new historicism is indebted to Marxism. But
whereas Marxism (at least in its more orthodox forms) tends to see literature as part of a
'superstructure' in which the economic 'base' (i.e. material relations of production) manifests
itself, new historicist thinkers tend to take a more nuanced view of power, seeing it not
exclusively as class-related but extending throughout society. This view derives primarily
from Michel Foucault.
In its tendency to see society as consisting of texts relating to other texts, with no 'fixed'
literary value above and beyond the way specific cultures read them in specific situations, new
historicism is a form of postmodernism applied to interpretive history.
New historicism shares many of the same theories as with what is often called cultural
materialism, but cultural materialist critics are even more likely to put emphasis on the present
implications of their study and to position themselves in disagreement to current power
structures, working to give power to traditionally disadvantaged groups. Cultural critics also
downplay the distinction between "high" and "low" culture and often focus predominantly on
the productions of "popular culture" (Newton 1988). [7] New historicists analyse text with an

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eye to history. With this in mind, new historicism is not "new". Many of the critiques that
existed between the 1920s and the 1950s also focused on literature's historical content. These
critics based their assumptions of literature on the connection between texts and their
historical contexts (Murfin & Supriya 1998).
New historicism also has something in common with the historical criticism of Hippolyte Taine,
who argued that a literary work is less the product of its author's imaginations than the social
circumstances of its creation, the three main aspects of which Taine called race, milieu, and
moment. It is also a response to an earlier historicism, practiced by early 20th century critics
such as John Livingston Lowes, which sought to de-mythologize the creative process by
reexamining the lives and times of canonical writers. But new historicism differs from both of
these trends in its emphasis on ideology: the political disposition, unknown to the author that
governs their work.

3. Examine the nature of the revolution in women's education proposed by Mary

Wollstonecraft? 20

Mary Wollstonecraft an English writer, philosopher, and advocate of women's rights. Until the
late 20th century, Wollstonecraft's life, which encompassed several unconventional personal
relationships at the time, received more attention than her writing. Today Wollstonecraft is
regarded as one of the founding feminist philosophers, and feminists often cite both her life
and her works as important influences.
During her brief career, she wrote novels, treatises, a travel narrative, a history of the French
Revolution, a conduct book, and a children's book. Wollstonecraft is best known for A
Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), in which she argues that women are not naturally
inferior to men, but appear to be only because they lack education. She suggests that both men
and women should be treated as rational beings and imagines a social order founded on
reason.
After Wollstonecraft's death, her widower published a Memoir (1798) of her life, revealing her
unorthodox lifestyle, which inadvertently destroyed her reputation for almost a century.
However, with the emergence of the feminist movement at the turn of the twentieth century,
Wollstonecraft's advocacy of women's equality and critiques of conventional femininity became
increasingly important.
After two ill-fated affairs, with Henry Fuseli and Gilbert Imlay (by whom she had a
daughter, Fanny Imlay), Wollstonecraft married the philosopher William Godwin, one of the
forefathers of the anarchist movement. Wollstonecraft died at the age of 38 leaving behind
several unfinished manuscripts. She died eleven days after giving birth to her second
daughter, Mary Shelley, who would become an accomplished writer and author
of Frankenstein.
Wollstonecraft was born on 27 April 1759 in Spitalfields, London. She was the second of the
seven children of Elizabeth Dixon and Edward John Wollstonecraft. Although her family had a

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comfortable income when she was a child, her father gradually squandered it on speculative
projects. Consequently, the family became financially unstable and they were frequently forced
to move during Wollstonecraft's youth. [] The family's financial situation eventually became so
dire that Wollstonecraft's father compelled her to turn over money that she would have
inherited at her maturity. Moreover, he was apparently a violent man who would beat his wife
in drunken rages. As a teenager, Wollstonecraft used to lie outside the door of her mother's
bedroom to protect her. Wollstonecraft played a similar maternal role for her sisters, Everina
and Eliza, throughout her life. For example, in a defining moment in 1784, she convinced Eliza,
who was suffering from what was probably postpartum depression, to leave her husband and
infant; Wollstonecraft made all of the arrangements for Eliza to flee, demonstrating her
willingness to challenge social norms. The human costs, however, were severe: her sister
suffered social condemnation and, because she could not remarry, was doomed to a life of
poverty and hard work.
Two friendships shaped Wollstonecraft's early life. The first was with Jane Arden in Beverley.
The two frequently read books together and attended lectures presented by Arden's father, a
self-styled philosopher and scientist. Wollstonecraft revelled in the intellectual atmosphere of
the Arden household and valued her friendship with Arden greatly, sometimes to the point of
being emotionally possessive. Wollstonecraft wrote to her: "I have formed romantic notions of
friendship ... I am a little singular in my thoughts of love and friendship; I must have the first
place or none." In some of Wollstonecraft's letters to Arden, she reveals the volatile and
depressive emotions that would haunt her throughout her life. The second and more important
friendship was with Fanny (Frances) Blood, introduced to Wollstonecraft by the Clares, a couple
in Hoxton who became parental figures to her; Wollstonecraft credited Blood with opening her
mind.
Unhappy with her home life, Wollstonecraft struck out on her own in 1778 and accepted a job
as a lady's companion to Sarah Dawson, a widow living in Bath. However, Wollstonecraft had
trouble getting along with the irascible woman (an experience she drew on when describing the
drawbacks of such a position in Thoughts on the Education of Daughters, 1787). In 1780 she
returned home upon being called back to care for her dying mother. Rather than return to
Dawson's employ after the death of her mother, Wollstonecraft moved in with the Bloods. She
realized during the two years she spent with the family that she had idealized Blood, who was
more invested in traditional feminine values than was Wollstonecraft. But Wollstonecraft
remained dedicated to Fanny and her family throughout her life (she frequently gave pecuniary
assistance to Blood's brother, for example).
Wollstonecraft had envisioned living in a female utopia with Blood; they made plans to rent
rooms together and support each other emotionally and financially, but this dream collapsed
under economic realities. In order to make a living, Wollstonecraft, her sisters, and Blood set up
a school together in Newington Green, a Dissenting community. Blood soon became engaged
and after their marriage her husband, Hugh Skeys, took her to Lisbon, Portugal, to improve her
health, which had always been precarious. Despite the change of surroundings Blood's health
further deteriorated when she became pregnant, and in 1785 Wollstonecraft left the school
and followed Blood to nurse her, but to no avail. Moreover, her abandonment of the school led

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to its failure. Blood's death devastated Wollstonecraft and was part of the inspiration for her
first novel

4. Bring out the main ideas in Roland Barthes' essay 'The Death of the Author'. 20

French philosopher Barthes' essay "The Death of the Author" is a post-structuralist text that
propagates the idea that there can be no essential structure and therefore, reflecting the ideas
of Derrida, words written by authors are part of the interminably intermixing words of cultures.
While this sounds very complex, in essence it means that authors can have no supremacy over
readers and that words can convey no meaning or intent other than what the reader
experiences. In this post-postmodern milieu, these ideas may not carry as much sway as they
did during Barthes' era when New Criticism and close reading were at their peaks.

Briefly, the ideas the Barthes brings out relate (1) to the impotence of the author to control
writing or the authorial experience and (2) to the power of the reader to be the determinate
factor in defining the meaning of the textual discourse. His first tenet is that the act of writing
(such as I am doing) creates a neutrality in which there is no voice, no identity, no personality--
there is only a negative space: "Writing is that neutral, ... space ..., the negative where all
identity is lost." This constitutes the entering into self-assimilation into a negative by the
author: "the author enters into his own death, writing begins." Barthes elaborates on this with
a brief history of the author as the object of prestige, of humanity and personhood. This is
significant to recall toward the end of the essay when Barthes invests the reader with prestige
after having buried the author.

A highly significant point Barthes makes is derived from post-structuralist linguistics. He asserts
that language (discourse) is separate from original intent; it is drawn from vast cultural memory
and experience and the only function an author can have is (1) to select from a vast internal
dictionary, so to speak, of words that play off of each other and (2) to mix and combine
elements in ways that don't sound too much like other previous combinations. It is by this same
means (the vast internal dictionary) that Barthes is able to invest the reader with the prestige
and supremacy that once belonged to the author: the reader has the same access and the same
ability to unite words that play (a concept attributed to Derrida) to derive an original meaning
on his own account. The author dies but the reader becomes supreme and invests meaning and
intent.

Barthes also importantly repositions the concept of writing imitating something. For Aristotle
and Sidney and such, writing imitated God's truths; for Romantics, writing imitated nature's
truths. For Barthes, life imitates the book that is drawn from the "dictionary ... that can know
no halt," yet the book is a collection of letters and words that imitate signs, the reality behind
which is "lost, infinitely deferred": thus meaning and intent can never be fixed, must always be
variable and up to the reader to determine.

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5. Outline the sign theory of Language as propounded by Saussure highlighting its specific
features.

Saussure’s sign theory of language is a revolutionary theory in which change the way people
look at how to study language and how it developed through society over time. This approach
derived from a distinctive characteristic of his perspective towards language during that time,
where he thought that most scholar still confused with the semiology and other branches of
science. Within this publication, he proposes his idea of semiology, which is the study of
language which should be carefully differentiated from ethnography, prehistory, anthropology,
as well as the way language function itself. From Saussure’s perspective, linguistics is a social
fact and something that can be studied separately from others. From his publication, he first
tells the differences between language and human speech. Human speech has numerous
dimensions, and have some different stands in various areas. For instance, within physical,
physiological, and psychological. As a result, it is difficult to unfold its unity or to put linguistic
into any classification of human fact since it belongs both to the individual and the society. On
the other hand, language possesses a self-contain form and a principle of its classification. This
approach to linguistic analysis proposes by Saussure encourages several other groundbreaking
theorists to further look through the social world and look at their process of the development.
These rethinking methods include the shift in how poststructuralist and post-Marxist theorists
perceive the social world as well as how they propose explanations on how societal processes
emerged. This essay will focus on Saussure’s influences on poststructuralism approach along
with the post-Marxist proposal on how they frame social and political analysis while looking at
some criticisms proposed by scholars who oppose to these methods of social and political
commentary and their explanations to the social world.

Within Saussure’s publication Course in General Linguistics, the particular highlights of

Saussure’s hypothesis look to lay on two fundamental components that incite a lot of thought
and inquiry. For Saussure, the sign hypothesis of how dialect works from the progression of
signifier and signified turns out to be extraordinarily essential. It is this component of joining
both the verbal advancement of dialect and what dialect implies to the social gathering that
structures the premise of Saussure’s hypothesis. His primary point was that, distinctive words
imply a similar affair despite the fact that they are unrelated to one and another. For example,
the German term for dog is incomprehensibly not quite the same as the Spanish word for dog.
However, they both ended up highlight similar development for what being thought to be
creature. Saussure proposes that linguistics has a signified work in that the appropriate
utilization of dialect alludes to a specific signified implying that is shared. Basically, his
hypothesis rests upon the comprehension of both signifier and signified (Saussure, 1964).
Additionally, Saussure’s theory mainly introduces several concepts in his sign theory of
language. Firstly, he dramatically emphasizes on the synchronic study of language instead of
the diachronic approach. From his perspective, on the one hand, synchronic itself refers to a
method that explores through a related term regardless of the differences of time. On the other
hand, diachronic investigates the evolution and how language develops itself over time.

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Without looking at linguistic through synchronic analysis, it would make no difference from
other who misunderstood the primary concern in the linguistic study (Howarth, 2013). Apart
from that, he coined the term semiology as an analysis of linguistics and investigates how the
sign plays its role within the society. The emergence of semiotics is in fact associated with the
structuralism philosophy, which also derived from Saussure’s thinking. In his publication, he
identifies the sign as a relationship between the signifier, or something that has meaning or so-
called the sound-image while the signified illustrates the definition or concept itself. Both
signified and signifier, according to Saussure, both play a prominent role in identifying the
contrast of each other as well as of a whole that they are part of (Howarth, 2013).
Saussure (1964) also highlights the arbitrary characteristic that the signified and the signifier
possess. As he points out, anything that exists does not come before its name and unable to
identify themselves, at the same time, not one particular society, or can be said that they are
immutable. Thus, the signifier is unchangeable and not free. Furthermore, while it is fixed by
one in particular but from the use of that linguistic community, it also shows that the linguistic
sign cannot be controlled illustrates a mutable characteristic where linguistic sign did not
always hold its property and changed through the continuity of time. Another point is that he
demonstrates the differences between la langue and la parole, where la langue refers to
collective knowledge of language and la parole appoints to personal actions, a spoken word,
and statements through his association of concepts and phonation. He distinguishes langue and
parole to illustrates the scope that most linguists should concern. In this case, to find a
systematic pattern of language in that particular time rather than making a comparison
language between time (Saussure, 1964). He also compares the study of language to a chess
game and emphasizes that what matter most is to consider the current position of one
particular piece at that time rather than where that piece walked in the previous turn. In short,
the main features of Saussure’s significant contribution to the sign theory of language lies upon
two compositions that heavily gives rises of thoughts and questioning. For Saussure, the most
critical factor in the sign theory of language is the process of language operation as the
dimensions and ideas of signifier and signified. Both signifier and signified are two crucial
elements that put together in term of the verbal process of language and how that language
signifies to the social group that facilitates Saussure to develop ideas of his explanation
(Saussure, 1964). As a result, his ground-breaking sign theory of language encourage numerous
scholars to apply his concept and seek for a further and convoluted explanation of the social
world. The following approaches are poststructuralism and post-Marxism which influenced the
way they analyze social and political affairs by Saussure’s theory.

From David Howarth’s publication (2013) ‘Poststructuralism and After’ poststructuralist

theorists mostly investigate the structure, formation, and the position of various social and
political identities in many settings. Such settings include classes, genders, ethnicities, races,
states, and sexual character (Howarth, 2013). Moreover, poststructuralist theorists also explore
the state of human subjectivity and their relationship in political identities and differences.
They also propose several critical debates toward the issues and misconceptions of ideology,
language, and the overall role they play within the social settings that they are part of.
According to David Howarth (2013), structuralism encourages poststructuralist theorists to
rethink of the social world through the deconstructive approach, or what Heidegger called the
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metaphysics of presence. They mainly focus on the deconstruction analysis of traditional point
of views toward social sciences and further raise serious queries about the Saussurean model
and its underlying assumptions (Howarth, 2013). While poststructuralist scholars acknowledge
the vital ideas, for example, structure, framework, articulation and the etymological sign as an
indispensable hypothetical component in reexamining linguistic relationship to human and
sociology. They additionally raise questions about the Suassurean model and its hidden
presumptions. One of the poststructuralist theorist mentioned in his publication is Jacque
Derrida who’s well known for the deconstruction and reconstruction analysis. Following
Saussure’s work, Derrida later deconstructs each element of Saussure’s definition of language
and stresses on the transfiguration of the linguistic ideology as a partition from the possibility
that has a settled center or birthplace to a view that the focal signified. The original or
supernatural signified never has an exact presence outside the framework of differences
(Howarth, 2013). Several poststructuralists investigate and gain further insights through the
deconstruction approaches according to Saussure’s contribution of sign theory of language.
Also, to the deconstruction in the state of beings and the origination of signified and signifier
through the alternative approach of “incomplete structure of signification that highlighted by
an irreducible play of meaning” (Howarth, 2013). Above all this, Saussure’s work has been
primarily utilized by Derrida within his deconstructive approach. Derrida’s idea of ‘differance’
mainly derived from the deconstruction and reconstruction of Saussure’s understandings. He
contests that the contemporary tradition actually based their philosophy on the presence fact.
From his perspective, it has something to do with both time and space that differentiate the
presence from other. At the same time, the development of all language through time and
space must be taken into account in order to enable a proper function of the ‘difference’
(Howarth, 2013).As also explained by Jonathan Joseph (2006), Derrida and Foucault, later react
against the rigidities of structuralism and the determinism or reductionism of Marxism. Inside
Derrida’s distribution, his concept of deconstruction concentrates on the generation of
importance through the text. It contends that the predominant Western type of information
have looked to impost significance or personality by attempting to balance out importance
around a settled point to the detriment of various or elective implications. This procedure, by
which, is depicted as logocentric point of view. Certain implications have been raised over
others by methods for forcing a specific rambling structure and barring those characters that
fall outside it. Be that as it may, if logocentrism is the inconvenience of a settled personality or
nearness, it can be undermined by indicating how this surmise an arrangement of energy
relations and how those relations may be other than they are (Joseph, 2006, pp. 128-130).
Deconstruction can along these lines be viewed as a political undertaking seeing that it urges us
to challenge logocentric talk by investigating the play of radical otherness or ‘differance’
approach. For this situation, differance suggests both varying and conceding or raising the
issues of both setting of importance and how it might change after some time. Derrida
proceeds with his investigate of settled identity and presence in his publication, which
endeavors to undermine the certainty of appearance and identity. Notwithstanding, while at
the same time dismissing the real type of Marxism, Derrida grasps its spirits. To aggregate
further, deconstruction tends to confine itself to epistemological inquiries worried about the
working of dialect or the content, and the status of importance inside it (Joseph, 2006, pp. 128-
130).

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Although all beings do not possess self-identity, that also creates a situation where all identity
possible. As a result, it can provide a trace of other beings that they are differ from or even to
things that are linked to their emergence. While their theory creates an alternative approach
for social and political science, poststructuralist philosophy gains numerous attentions and
criticism from other perspectives who doubt the perception of the poststructuralist
metaphysics explanation of entities, concepts, or even their logical explanation of the creation
of beings. Most critiques revolve around the hardship in interpreting and developing the
abstraction of the theory and reasoning and turning it to an empirical social and political
analysis. Another question raised on its philosophical presuppositions, which looks at the
accusation, that is not proven, of language and the definition in social sciences as same as the
reduction of importance in reality and material conditions. Also, several set of argument
associated with a broad topic of poststructuralist approach and the strategies to counter
against the issues of social structure and institutions (Howarth, 2013). According to David
Howarth (2013), poststructuralism contains a certain link of structuralism and the discourses
that deal with basic understanding of continuity and discontinuity. From his publication,
poststructuralism thus serves as a weak analysis that exposes alternative fundamental changes
of the traditional views within structuralism by pointing out the weak points and its limitations.
Within the debate, there are some issues that possess in poststructuralism. First is the problem
in defining and coming up with an accurate definition and its conceptual scope. Secondly,
although the terminology identifies a clear cut between poststructuralism and its former
descendent approach, several poststructuralists shows little distinction between their historical
divisions that separate both structuralism and poststructuralism from each other. Another
problem is that, poststructuralism illustrates standing points in many human and social science
areas while showing its unclear origination. Thus, shows an unclear scope and relationship of
the theory and any other field (Howarth, 2013). Additionally, in spite of the fact that there Is no
watertight accord on the character and import of poststructuralism. As Howarth agrees that
most poststructuralist scholars do agree on some fundamental hypothetical systems and
strategy. For a certain thing, they challenge those viewpoints that reify social relations and
marvels by regarding them as common, or by methodically overlooking their political origins or
social essentialness. They, accordingly, concur that the ideas, discourse, organizations and
social hierarchies are not unceasing and settled substances, but rather historical and social
construction (Howarth, 2013). From Howarth’s publication, he explains that “They are not
grounded in nature or rooted in the way things really are; nor do they simply mirror or track a
stable, underlying social reality. On the contrary, they are contaminated by multiple impurities
and differences that problematize stable essences of pure form.” (Howarth, 2013). Moreover,
he further clarifies using the word ‘Man’ and the interpretation of the terminology, which
derives from cultural and discursive constructed that both individual and social group be able to
understand. As a result, this allows poststructuralist theorists to seek further explanation on the
value and ideology of human as well as the linkage to such other values and particular groups.
The main strength of poststructuralist is the absence in core theoretical explanation and
epistemological grounds to put one particular explanation on top of another, and be able to
look for an explanation from various perspectives.

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