Derrida's term 'différance' (spelled with an 'a') is designed to signal which two ideas simultaneously?
ADeconstruction and dialogue
BDifference and deferral
CDissemination and democracy
DDivision and displacement
Différance is a portmanteau of 'différer' in two senses: to differ (identity through contrast) and to defer (meaning always postponed to another sign). Crucially, the substitution of 'a' for 'e' is invisible in spoken French — the word performs the instability it names by producing a difference that exists only in writing, not in speech.
Question 2 True / False
Post-structuralism claims that literary texts have no meaning at most, making interpretation futile.
TTrue
FFalse
Answer: False
This is the most common misreading of post-structuralism. The claim is not that texts are meaningless, but that texts cannot be closed to a single, authoritative meaning. Meaning is plural, unstable, and produced through reading practices rather than recovered from a fixed origin. Post-structuralism multiplies interpretation rather than canceling it.
Question 3 Short Answer
What does Barthes mean by the 'death of the author,' and what does it open up for the reader?
Think about your answer, then reveal below.
Model answer: Barthes argues that once a text is written, the author's intentions have no special authority over its meaning. Removing the author as the controlling interpretive source frees the text to produce multiple meanings activated by different readers.
The 'death of the author' is a methodological move, not a biographical claim. It shifts interpretive authority from a single origin (the author's intention) to the field of language itself, which readers traverse differently. The 'birth of the reader' is the correlate: meaning emerges in the act of reading rather than residing in a prior authorial mind.