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[...] Psychoanalysis, on the other hand, is in the phrase of one of its interpreters a 'hermeneutic of suspicion': its concern is not just to 'read the text' of the unconscious, but to uncover the processes, the dream-work, by which that text was produced. To do this, it focuses in particular on wh…

[...] the conflict between men and women could not have been more real, the ideology of this antagonism involved a metaphysical illusion If it was held in place by the material and psychical benefits which accrued to men from it, it was also held in place by a complex structure of fear, desire, agg…

[...] Derrida is clearly out to do more than develop new techniques of reading: deconstruction is for him an ultimately political practice, an attempt to dismantle the logic by which a particular system of thought, and behind that a whole system of political structures and social institutions, ma…

[...] All literary texts are woven out of other literary texts, not in the conventional sense that they bear the traces of 'influence' but in the more radical sense that every word, phrase or segment is a reworking of other writings which precede or surround the individual work. There is no such th…

The early structuralist Barthes still trusts to the possibility of a 'science' of literature [...] Such a scientific criticism would in some sense aim to know its object 'as it really was'; but does this not run counter to Barthes' hostility to the neutral sign? The critic, after all, has to use la…