| Tel Quel was a leading avant-garde literary journal from 1960-1981. Its editors and influential Post-Structuralist collaborators such as Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, and Julia Kristeva insisted that their intellectual movement eluded historicization and contextualization. Perhaps taking their cues from the Telquelians, to date virtually no historical studies examine the genesis and development of Structuralism and Post-Structuralism. Rather than examine these two movements solely within the theoretical realms of philosophy or literary criticism, this dissertation explores Structuralism and Post- Structuralism as a cultural phenomenon. Like previous intellectual movements, Structuralism and Post-Structuralism were conceived by a specific group of intellectuals who were limited and shaped by the confines of France's particular academic milieu. Both movements also described experiences beyond the university for a postwar generation deeply marked by the colonial wars in Vietnam and Algeria, decolonization, disillusionment with Communism, and the 1968 uprisings. An historical analysis of these various complex relationships--between Structuralism and colonialism, anti-engagement and the rejection of Communism, the phenomenon of postmodernity, May 1968, and Post-Structuralism--sheds valuable additional insights on French intellectual life after World War Two. |
