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‘Method’This type of formulation of the problem, with its insistence on margins as against centres, on difference as a prior condition of identity, can quickly be labelled ‘post-structuralist’in its inspiration. The label ‘post structuralist’(which is not itself a post-structuralist label) cannot, however, be simply applied from a methodological or theoretical ‘outside’to designate a particular way of approaching a predefined ques tion (in this case, that of ‘nation and narration’): for the question of ‘post structuralism’itself immediately involves questions of nationality (French, American, English, German...), but also general questions of institution which cannot be separated from those involved in the problem of the nation. More especially, the name ‘post-structuralism’immediately raises temporal or historical questions which will further complicate the spatial complications of frontiers sketched out above. In more than one way, the …