Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun A structuralist approach to texts and especially to literary works that conceives of language as based in rational thought and holding meaning by virtue of its potential relation to fundamental reality.
  • noun Excessive attention paid to the meanings of words or distinctions in their usage.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun The analysis of literature, focusing on the words and grammar to the exclusion of context or literary merit.

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

logo- +‎ centrism

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Examples

  • If we presume the signifier is the signified we fall into the trap of logocentrism.

    Archive 2009-04-10 2009

  • If we presume the signifier is the signified we fall into the trap of logocentrism.

    An Exploration into an Integral Approach to Knowledge 2009

  • The homegrown logocentrism that prevailed among them distinguished them in a region where men were supposed to be taciturn.

    Raymond Carver Carol Sklenicka 2009

  • The result is a "centrism," which Derrida characterizes, because of the master quality of the name logos for Greek thought, as "logocentrism."

    enowning enowning 2008

  • The result is a "centrism," which Derrida characterizes, because of the master quality of the name logos for Greek thought, as "logocentrism."

    Archive 2008-07-01 enowning 2008

  • Returning to UEA, she completed a critique of the contemporary French poet Yves Bonnefoy, and of “logocentrism” in French poetry.

    Frances Presley greenintegerblog 2008

  • And as we have seen, this logocentrism must endlessly condemn and expel what we may call the technicity of language: technicity, here, signaling not just "mechanical" iterability, but the irreducibility and irreducible unpredictability of mediation. 13

    Professing Literature: John Guillory's Misreading of Paul de Man 2005

  • Now to be fair, this logocentrism appears to have fostered science, by providing categories of thought to us, and also by raising problems of what “to be” and “change” even can mean.

    Kenneth Miller through a magnifying glass - The Panda's Thumb 2006

  • Sometimes Western logocentrism has been labeled as “creationistic”, due to this sense of an unchanging “existence” through time that seems to owes much to the use of the copula in our language.

    Kenneth Miller through a magnifying glass - The Panda's Thumb 2006

  • FOREMAN: Um, some logocentrism would have been mighty helpful there.

    The Little Professor: 2006

  • The superstitious valuing of speech over writing – often called “logocentrism” – is a long-lived prejudice in western civilisation.

    Who wins from public debate? Liars, bullies and trolls Steven Poole 2019

Comments

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  • Claiming legitimacy by reference to external, universally truthful propositions. Postmodernists are opposed to logocentric thought. (Rosenau, 1991)

    October 10, 2010

  • I could understand, were I bright,

    Or might comprehend, save for fright,

    But logocentrism hosts

    Strange goblins and ghosts,

    And things that go bump in the night.

    May 22, 2015