City of God, with its jumbled piecemeal style of conveying a story having a number of different themes and contextual strands, follows certain contemporary patterns of literary experimentation. One of the more important of these techniques is poststructuralism. Since interpretations of stylistic modes vary with the individual critic and literary handbook, the following succinct definition, taken from Literary Criticism: An Introduction to Theory and Practice, by Charles E. Bressler (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1994) will serve as a useful guide. A brief summary follows. The prior theoretical approach to poststructuralism, structuralism, affirms the text's objective reality. Structuralism holds that a text can be examined by "using a standard and objective methodology and" then coming to some conclusion. Poststructuralism often maintains "undecidability concerning a text's meaning," declaring "that.....
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