Poststructuralism in literary theory rejects structuralism's assumption of stable, decipherable meaning, reconceiving literature as a site of production, rupture, and multiplicity rather than reflection or representation. Core mechanisms include Barthes's myth/connotation and the "death of the author" (meaning arises in reading, not authorial intent), Foucault's "author function" and power/knowledge as mutually constitutive (discourse produces rather than merely describes reality), Deleuze and Guattari's "assemblage" and "minor literature" (language as performative force rather than reference), and Derrida's deconstruction of binary oppositions via différance, trace, and iterability. Together these reframe criticism within literary theory as an act of participatory, provisional meaning-making rather than the recovery of fixed truth.
Poststructuralism in literary theory rejects structuralism's assumption of stable, decipherable meaning, reconceiving literature as a site of production, rupture, and multiplicity rather than reflect…