There was typo in my last post--I meant "Pithy" not "pity."

We're out of the range of "low hanging fruit" when we start trading Derrida and Foucault, I hope you realize that. :)

My approach to postmodern theory is through literary criticism. The Formalists, those who tended to read a text and assign a "correct" interpretation of it came before, and there were a lot of problems with that approach. It certainly (probably unintentionally) went a long way to keeping non-mainstream students out of the field. I agree with the postmodern view that ties in with semiotics that says each reader brings their own meanings and experiences to a text. It depends on what cultural baggage you're carrying around in your language.

You see the word "tree." A picture pops into your mind. Your tree picture is not the same as mine. Right there we have a different interpretation of the text. Even if we're more specific as to species, maple tree or live oak tree, we still have different pictures, though we are both seeing a tree. We each write from our cultural center, and those around us tend to understand the things in the way we intend them. Those in the margins understand something different. I specialized in American Indian literature in graduate school, and it was quickly clear that Indian writers were centering their texts differently, not for the mainstream. You have to work to understand these books because they're not written to you. If you're a white middle class mainstream American reader you're in the margin when it comes to these stories.

Derrida wrote a marvelous essay that I used in my thesis. "Structure, sign and play in the discourse of the human sciences." This essay has appeared in numerous collections, and in several translations. In the first instance where I read it the editor, David Lodge, notes

"'Structure, Sign and Play' marks the moment at which 'post-structuralism; as a movement begins, opposing itself to classical structuralism as well as to traditional humanism and empiricism: the moment, as Derrida himself puts it, when 'the structurality of structure had to begin to be thought'. Classical structuralism based on Saussure's linguistics, held out the hope of achieving a 'scientific' account of culture by identifying the system that underlies the infinite manifestations of any form of cultural production. The structural anthropology of Claude Levi-Strauss tried to do this for myth. But, says Derrida, all such analyses imply that they are based upon some secure ground, a 'centre' or 'transcendental signified', that is outside the system under investigation and guarantees its intelligibility. There is, however, no such secure ground, according to Derrida--it is a philosophical fiction." (Modern Criticism and Theory, 107)

SRS