Reflection 11
April 19, 2011

          The topic for today was a combination of post-modernism and post-structuralism. Modernism and post-modernism are viewed as cultural projects. Modernism consists of principles such as identity, unity, authority, and certainty, whereas post-modernism has an association with plurality, textuality, and skepticism. The previously dominant feature of modernism used the “scientific mentality of objectivity and progress associated with the Enlightenment" (Postmodernism 1) However, post-modernism does not believe in ultimate truth, sees everything as relational, and defends ideological views thereby dismissing the modernistic viewpoint. Post-modernism has no self without language, ideology, history, the world, and context. It is not the autonomous self, but is fragmented with everything textual. Post-modernism has a close relationship with post-structuralism because “anti-humanism, as a rejection of the enlightenment subject, is often a central tenet" (Post-structuralism 1) Another factor is the influence of existential phenomenology.

         Structuralism originated as an intellectual movement in France in the 1950s and 1960s. Texts were some of the items known as cultural products used to scrutinize their underlying structures. The use of analytical concepts such as linguistics, anthropology and psychology, as well as others, were used for interpretation purposes. A study of knowledge with a critiquing of the structuralist premises is known as post-structuralism, and “The concept of “self” as a separate, singular, and coherent entity is a fictional construct within this philosophy" (Post-structuralism 2) In studying a text a reader must understand the relationship of the work to the concept of one’s self.

          Today Dr. Wexler played a portion of “American Psycho” for the class and it was interesting to see how simulacrum was manifested in Patrick Bateman and his mask. He seemed to have the attributes of a robot with a superficial “self,” and a mask hiding the truth. It showed Bateman removing his facial mask; however, he needed to remove his real mask to reveal his true identity—a psycho!

Word Count: 305

Works Cited

 Leitch, Vincent B., ed. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism.

         New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2010. Print.
" Mask." En.wikipedia.org. Wikipedia, 24 April 2011. Web.
         24 April 2011.

“Postmodernism.” En.wikipedia.org. Wikipedia, 19 April 2011. Web.

          24 April 2011.

“Post-structuralism.” En.wikipedia.org. Wikipedia, 6 April 2011. Web.

        24 April 2011.

“Structuralism.” En.wikipedia.org. Wikipedia, 18 April 2011. Web.

        19 March 2011.