How It All Got Started
It's ironic to point to a single moment, or even a series of moments, as the starting point of poststructuralism, because poststructuralists by the fiber of their beings think that origins are about as real as unicorns, the Loch Ness monster, or pay equity based on gender. That said, let's see what we can learn from giving this story a conventional narrative form.
Picture this. It's October, 1966. Baltimore. A dark and stormy night and all that. A gaggle of scholars have gathered at the Johns Hopkins Humanities Center to take part in an interdisciplinary, bilingual symposium named "The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man."
In it, prominent scholars (mostly men) have come to exchange insights from fields as diverse as anthropology, classics, comp lit, history, linguistics, semiology, sociology, philosophy, and psychoanalysis. The hot topic on everyone's lips is structuralism. What's it mean? Where's it going? How best to apply its methods across the gamut of the humanities and social sciences? So, 1966 was the place to be, huh?