Beyond Poststructuralism

Authorial intention matters, texts can hold together, and claims about human experience can be tested against the world. Edited by Wendell Harris, this collection takes aim at the assumptions of structuralist and poststructuralist thought that linger long after the theories behind them lost their grip. The first part works through them one by one: the insistence that meaning is undecidable, that every hierarchy of value can be reversed, that history is merely a contest of competing narratives.

The second part turns from critique to construction, asking how literary study might reconnect with lived experience and how literature widens the alternatives to what is unjust or absurd in our social arrangements. Contributors include John Searle, A. D. Nuttall, Raymond Tallis and Martha Nussbaum. A bracing collection for anyone who suspected theory had lost sight of why books matter.