This text may be freely used, with attribution, for non-profit purposes. As are all of my posts for this course, this document is open to change. Contemporary Literary Theory is not a single thing but a collection of theoretical approaches which are marked by a number of premises, although not all of the theoretical approaches share or agree on all of the them. As the revisionist Freudian Jacques Lacan remarks, a sign signals the absence of that which it signifies.
Meanings are multiple, changing, contextual.
There are only local and contingent truths generated by human groups through their cultural systems in response to their needs for power, survival and esteem. Consequently, values and identity are cultural constructs, not stable entities. Even the unconscious is a cultural construct, as Kaja Silverman points out in The Subject of Semiotics , in that the unconscious is constructed through repression, the forces of repression are cultural, and what is taboo is culturally formulated. Language is a much more complex, elusive phenomenon than we ordinarily suspect, and what we take normally to be our meanings are only the surface of a much more substantial theatre of linguistic, psychic and cultural operations, of which operations we are not be fully aware. It is language itself, not some essential humanness or timeless truth, that is central to culture and meaning.