Jacques Derrida’s Structure, Sign, and Play is one of the most controversial and influential philosophical texts of the 20th century. Delivered at a conference on structuralism at Johns Hopkins, the lecture took aim at the critical and philosophical fashions of the time and radically proposing a world in which meaning cannot be pinned down or traced to an origin, but instead is continuously shifting, fleeting, and open to play. Hailed by many as a watershed in philosophy and liter...

Michel Foucault’s 1969 essay “What is an Author?” sidesteps the stormy arguments surrounding “intentional fallacy” and the “death of the author,” offering an entirely different way of looking at texts. Foucault points out that all texts are written but not all are discussed as having “authors”. So what is special about “authored” texts? And what makes an “author” different to other kinds of text-producers? From its deceptively simple titular question, Foucault’s essay offers a complex argu...

Judith Butler's Gender Trouble is a perfect example of creative thinking. The book redefines feminism's struggle against patriarchy as part of a much broader issue: the damaging effects of all our assumptions about gender and identity.Looking at the factionalism of contemporary (1980s) feminism, Butler saw a movement split by identity politics. Riven by arguments over what it meant to be a women, over sexuality, and over class and race, feminism was falling prey to interna...

Butler’s 1990 work shook the foundations of feminist theory and changed the conversation about gender. While many thinkers already accepted that “gender” was a category constructed by society defined by one’s genitalia, Butler went further and argued that gender is performative—it exists only in the acts that express it. Society determines that wearing makeup is “feminine”—but some men wear makeup. Are they “women”? Following Butler’s argument, they are if they say they are. Butler frees g...

As recently as the 1920s, the lack of great female writers was often considered evidence of women’s inferiority. Virginia Woolf disagreed. Her 1929 essay argues that creativity is impossible without privacy and freedom from financial worries, and throughout history, women have had neither therefore, no tradition of great female writing existed. Woolf’s focus on the everyday suppression of women was a turning point in feminism, marking a realization that gaining legal and voting rights was ...

A Room of One's Own is a very clear example of how creative thinkers connect and present things in novel ways.Based on the text of a talk given by Virginia Woolf at an all-female Cambridge college, Room considers the subject of 'women and fiction.' Woolf’s approach is to ask why, in the early 20th century, literary history presented so few examples of canonically 'great' women writers. The common prejudices of the time suggested this was caused by (and proof of) w...