Editing Post-structuralism (section)

== Criticism ==
Some observers from outside of the post-structuralist camp have questioned the rigour and legitimacy of the field. American philosopher [[John Searle]]
suggested in 1990: "The spread of 'poststructuralist' [[literary theory]] is perhaps the best-known example of a silly but non-catastrophic phenomenon."<ref>Searle, John. (1990). "[http://www.ditext.com/searle/searle1.html The Storm Over the University]." ''[[The New York Review of Books]]'', 6 December 1990.</ref><ref>{{cite journal |last1=Searle |first1=John |date=6 December 1990 |title=The Storm Over the University |url=https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1990/12/06/the-storm-over-the-university/ |journal=The New York Review of Books |volume=37 |issue=19 |location=New York |issn=0028-7504 |access-date=6 June 2020 |author1-link=John Searle}}</ref> Similarly, physicist [[Alan Sokal]] in 1997 criticized "the [[postmodernism|postmodernist]]/poststructuralist gibberish that is now [[hegemonic]] in some sectors of the American academy."<ref>Sokal, Alan. 1997. "[http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/le_monde_english.html Professor Latour's Philosophical Mystifications]." (Originally published in French in ''[[Le Monde]]'', 31 January 1997; translated by the author.)</ref>

Literature scholar [[Norman Holland]] in 1992 saw post-structuralism as flawed due to reliance on [[Ferdinand de Saussure|Saussure]]'s linguistic model, which was seriously challenged by the 1950s and was soon abandoned by linguists:<blockquote>Saussure's views are not held, so far as I know, by modern linguists, only by literary critics and the occasional philosopher. [Strict adherence to Saussure] has elicited wrong [[film theory|film]] and literary theory on a grand scale. One can find dozens of books of literary theory bogged down in signifiers and signifieds, but only a handful that refers to [[Chomsky]]."<ref>Holland, Norman N. (1992) ''The Critical I'', Columbia University Press, {{ISBN|0-231-07650-9}}, p. 140.</ref></blockquote>