...To the extent that post-structuralism has been a French phenomenon, it has taken place in a context where the contributions of structuralist thought were already accepted as solid achievements, which could then be used, taken apart, opened up, in the movement beyond, whereas the current popularity of some forms of post-structuralism in this country seems at times to be without context, indeed simply the indulgence, under a new guise, of the traditional American penchant for exegesis and interpretation. Relatively few American critics appear to have absorbed the lessons of a structuralist poetics. Some of them have simply performed a shortcut back to interpretation, now flying post-structuralist banners.-Peter Brooks, in his 1981 introduction to Tzvetan Todorov's Introduction to Poetics
One could take this excellent statement farther and argue, as I often do, that there was no such thing as post-structuralism. But again this presupposes getting your contexts right, i.e. reading (and understanding) enough.
2 comments:
This is an awesome quote from Peter (although the phrase "structuralist poetics" gives me the willies; the primary claim of structuralism was its inter-disciplinary efficacy - why can't we just say "structural analysis," regardless of what genre or form we happen to be reading?). He's pretty much dead on (and in 1981!?)
We've discussed this before, of course; I also find the term 'post-structuralism' problematic, even in a European context, because I think that 'post-structuralist' analysis is still fundamentally an analysis of structure(s). But (again, as we've discussed before) it's especially tricky in an American context, where there never really was such a thing as structuralism.
"Poetics" has a very special valence for Todorov, and that's why Peter, who is introducing Todorov's text, uses the word. It is a bit too neo-Aristotelian, but it has the same status for the later structuralists as "rhetoric" still does here, pretty much, and so I think it's pretty excusable. The point is that poetics is indeed more specific than analysis, which implies something like "structuralism applied," in the way that we talk now about "applied theory:" Todorov wants to fill out the area in between theory and reading, or rather reveal it as a plenitude, rather than do what we do here in America (since we're so close-reading heavy) and assume that the relationship implies a lack, a void--that is, he wants to suggest that we can do much more than just apply a theory to an object, and so he needs a more positive word for that. I think it is defensible when you take it in this context, but then again, I also think it is quite arbitrary (and Todorov somewhat thinks so too). It really just means "applied theory," but you see that this American name actually only is a symptom of the problem Todorov is trying to solve with that word (as de Man tried to do with "rhetoric").
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