Structuralism, poststructuralism and deconstruction

Abstract

WE have decided to look again at Richard II, with a particular emphasis on the differences between our discussion of the play here and our initial discussion of it in chapter 2. At that point we were largely interested in describing the basic moves to make with a text. Here we want to look at the way to build a reading that focuses on the issue of language in the play and how the play might be said, in some senses, to be about language. This, very broadly, can be called a structuralist approach: some structuralist criticism is very technical and concerned with the general principles that operate in literature, but for our purposes we can take structuralism to mean looking at a text to see how it thematises the issue of language, how the problems of interpreting language become the text’s main concern. As we will see, however, much more is involved than just language.