1980: Structuralism and Poststructuralism

1980: Structuralism and Poststructuralism

The early 1980s in France were marked by the death of the major structuralists: Roland Barthes in 1980, Jacques Lacan in 1981, and Michel Foucault in 1984. (Louis Althusser also exited from the scene in 1980, hospitalized in a psychiatric institution after killing his wife.) In the United States, however, the 1980s witnessed the assimilation of the work of these major figures, along with that of Jacques Derrida, as what came to be called “poststructuralism.” This is a curious conjuncture: Why should structuralism become poststructuralism in America? Frank Lentricchia blames Derrida. Describing the American critical scene in 1980, he writes, “Sometime in the early 1970s we awoke from the dogmatic slumber of our phenomenological sleep to find that a new presence had taken absolute hold over our avant-garde critical imagination: Jacques Derrida. Somewhat startlingly, we learned that, despite a number of loose characterizations to the contrary, he brought not structuralism but something that would be called ‘poststructuralism'” (Lentricchia 159). It is scarcely clear what Lentricchia has in mind in speaking of “the dogmatic slumber of our phenomenological sleep,” as if American criticism had been dogmatically yet unthinkingly phenomenological. In fact, there was little explicitly phenomenological criticism around. In Lentricchia's own chapter on phenomenology, before discussing continental theorists such as Husserl, Sartre, and Heidegger, he mentions only the French critic Georges Poulet, and then J. Hillis Miller, whose books, The World of Charles Dickens (1958), The Disappearance of God: Five Nineteenth-Century Writers (1963), and Poets of Reality: Six Twentieth-Century Writers (1965), studied the imaginative world of these authors, adopting the methods of the Geneva School critics (Poulet, Marcel Raymond, Jean-Pierre Richard et al.), who conceived of criticism as identification with the imaginative experience of the author. But Miller's was a lonely voice: phenomenology was neither a dominant critical position nor a dogmatic one.