Writing Logocentrism

Logocentrism is a key term in deconstruction; it argues that there is a persistent but morbid centering of Logos (meaning thought, truth, law, reason, logic, word, and the Word) in Western thought since Plato. Putting Logos at the center of discourse gives it an unquestioned status of priority and privilege—a maneuver sometimes extended to a privileging of the male order in the form of “phallogocentrism.” Jonathan Culler, following Jacques Derrida, defines logocentrism as “the orientation of philosophy toward an order of meaning… conceived as existing in itself, as foundation.” Logocentrism is the fundamental error of mistaking what is an arbitrary and artificial construct for a verifiable event. (Handbook to Literature)

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Sources

The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain, from Vienna 1900 to the PresentEric Kandel.

A Handbook to Literature. William Harmon.

“Cogito et Histoire de la Folie.” Jacques Derrida.

Cognitive Neuropsychology Section, Laboratory of Brain and Cognition.

Eats Shoots and Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation. Lynne Truss.

The Elements of Style. William Strunk. 

New Oxford American DictionaryEdited by Angus Stevenson and Christine A. Lindberg.

The Norton Anthology of World LiteratureMartin Puchner, et al.

The Norton Introduction to PhilosophyGideon Rosen and Alex Byrne.

Woe is I: The Grammarphobe’s Guide to Better English in Plain English. Patricia T. O’Conner

Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft. Janet Burroway, Elizabeth Stuckey-French & Ned Stuckey-French.

Writing the Other. Nisi Shawl and Cynthia Ward.

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Eckleburg is a print and online literary journal that offers original fiction, poetry, essays, music, art, writing workshops and more.