DECONSTRUCTION Deconstruction is kind a kind of reading of literary or other anthropocentric texts. It has posited a kind of undecidability of meaning for all texts. The text has intertwined and contradictory discourses, gaps, and incoherencies, since language itself is unstable and arbitrary. The critic doesnt undermine the text; the text already dismantles itself. Its rhetoric subverts or undermines its ostensible meaning. Jacques Derrida opposed the metaphysics of presence, . . . the claim in literature or philosophy that we can find some full, rich meaning outside of or prior to language itself. The hierarchy of binaries on which this assertion rests is untenable. Privileging speech over writing = logocentrism; spoken or written words have meaning only by differance from other words. Deconstructive critics focus on the text like the formalists, but direct attention to the opposite of the New Critical unities. Instead, they view the decentering of texts and point out incompatabilities, rhetorical grain-against-grain contradictions, undecidability within texts. There is often a playfulness to deconstruction, but it can be daunting to understand deconstruction in literary texts.
Posted on: Thu, 04 Dec 2014 12:52:21 +0000
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