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as in for example, its refusal to engage with the historical aspects
of the phenomena it analysed. The young Bulgarian academic Julia
Kristeva, arriving in Paris from Bulgaria in
, introduced those
involved with structural semiotics to the work of the Russian liter-
ary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin.
10
Unknown in France until that point,
Bakhtin's work enabled a reintroduction of the historical into the
structuralist paradigm, with its insistence on the necessity of under-
standing of a work within its particular context. From this basis
Kristeva developed the idea of intertextuality, which sought to
understand how a literary work engaged with its contemporaries.
Roland Barthes was fascinated by this approach and later
employed it in
S/Z
, his analysis, published in
1965
, of a short story
by Balzac.
11
At the same time, though starting from a different point,
the Algerian-born philosopher Jacques Derrida was using ideas
and methodologies developed from the work of Sigmund Freud,
Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger to engage in close read-
ings of philosophical and literary texts, in order to reveal their
inner contradictions, which he named 'Deconstruction' after the
Heideggerian term 'Destruktion'. What Derrida aimed to demon-
strate, among other things, was the impossibility of securing
meaning in a text. For him signification is an endless play of
difference without any centre that could put an end to the ever-
proliferating possibilities. In
1970
, when classical Structuralism was
seemingly at its most powerful, Derrida published several highly
influential accounts of his ideas. One was a collection of essays
entitled
L'écriture et la différence
,
12
another was an extended exami-
nation of Western philosophy through the close reading of key texts,
entitled
De la grammatologie
.
13
In the latter Derrida showed that
Western thinking had been dominated by a 'phonocentricism' that
privileged the voice, and by extension the presence of the speaker,
over writing.
L'écriture et la différence
contained a paper entitled
'Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences',
14
which, when presented at a conference at Johns Hopkins University,
1967
