ABSTRACT
The relationship between structuralism and post-structuralism has been widely misunderstood due to the way in which the ideas associated with both isms came into academic discourse. Part, if not the entirety, of the problem was the very fact that these two clusters of ideas (I hesitate to say intellectual movements) – the former a product of the 1950s and the latter of the 1960s-1970s – were lumped into what would in the 1980s and 1990s be known as ‘postmodernism’. As structuralism and post-structuralism were, rightly or wrongly, known as the intellectual sources of postmodernism, hopes of a proper understanding in the Englishspeaking world would be all but jettisoned. Depending on one’s intellectual allegiances and sympathies, postmodernism would be seen as either totally revolutionary or intellectual detritus, and with it structuralism and post-structuralism.
