This digest provides a historical review of some current literary theories and practices which developed from contemporary philosophy. Structuralism, associated with Ferdinand de Saussure and Claude Levi-Strauss, with a seemingly scientific view of language and culture posited a systemic "center" that organized and sustained an entire structure. The historic attack against this central premise of structuralism is usually traced to a paper entitled "Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences," delivered by Jacques Derrida in 1966. Derrida criticized the Western "logocentric" notion of an ever-active transcendent center or ground. Poststructuralism is generally considered to include three main features: the primacy of theory; the decentering of the subject; and the fundamental importance of the reader. Following is a discussion on: (1) How has poststructuralism as a theory affected English classroom practices in the teaching of literature? and (2) How has poststructuralism affected the teaching of writing? Contains 15 references. (NKA)