Every theory has its pet names. What does Poststructuralism think of literature, authors, and readers?
What is literature?
Literature is so passé. Let's talk about text instead.
It's time to throw away all these imaginary distinctions that give us "great books" and "great authors" and "glorious works of art." Yawn! Language is operating everywhere, and a billboard ad or tabloid exposé can be just as rich a read as Middlemarch. Get your nose out of that dusty old book and take a look at how writing is shaping the world.
What is an author?
Well, a writer is a human being like any other, existing in and through language, and, for whatever reason, spending a lot of time writing stuff down.
The capital-A Author, on the other hand, doesn't exist. We certainly can't appeal to any singular "author"-ity to find meaning in a text; most of the time, writers are oblivious to half the stuff they're streaming onto the page.
The only reason we still refer to writers' names at all is that they're useful for making categorizations. It's helpful to say that J.K. Rowling wrote Harry Potter and The Cuckoo's Calling, and it's really interesting to track the discursive effects that a writer's name can have.
But, in the end, no text has any one author: language is far too slippery for that.
What is a reader?
In deconstruction, a reader is someone who can zero in on a small, seemingly unimportant moment in a text, and then take aim. After the dust settles, they'll discover how that tiny moment exposes the text's own logic contradicting itself…and they'll tell us why that contradiction was necessary, too.
A poststructuralist reader does the same, but they're interested in the bigger picture. Why stop at a single text when you can pry apart the hinges of the whole culture? The poststructuralist reader sees writing everywhere—even reading can be writing too!