After 1945, literary theory stopped asking only 'is this poem good?' and started asking how meaning is made at all. Example: Saussure's claim that a word's meaning comes from its difference from other words — 'cat' means what it does because it is not 'bat', 'hat' or 'cut' — is the seed from which structuralism, and then its critics, grew.
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Literary Theory post World War II
English (Code 30) · Unit 9 · ~13 min read · Original chapter
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