What’s the Story? Poststructuralism, Discourse and Narrative

Abstract

Partly as a reaction against an overemphasis on economic relations, and partly out of a desire to deconstruct monolithic categories, such as class, ‘race’ or gender, in order to understand the specificity of people’s experience, a new body of critical theory arose from the 1970s onwards which moved increasingly away from the structural approaches discussed in the previous chapter. Building on the work of later critical structuralists, and on the very different traditions of psychoanalysis and linguistic structuralism, it started to explore the operation and contestation of power within the realms of ideology, culture, discourse and language. It was argued that this was a level of social relations that needed to be theorised in its own right — not just as a reflection of processes of material exploitation.