Deconstructionism
Jacques Derrida – argued that in Western Culture people tend to think in binary oppositions
Look at these White/black Masculine/feminine Beginning/end Presence/absence Nonconformity/conformity Love/hate
Deconstructionists look first at language – they say it is much more slippery and ambiguous than we realize
Deconstruction asks you to look at the ambiguities several sentences can have
Emphasis and context Time flies like an arrow
Language is what forms us
Language is constantly overflowing with implications, associations, and contradictions that reflect the implications, associations, and contradictions of the ideologies of which it is formed.
Language is our ground of being or the foundations from which our experience and knowledge of the world is generated
Each of us is a kaleidoscope of selves
Deconstruction – 1 – language is dynamic, ambiguous, and unstable continually disseminating possible meanings
2 – existence has no center, no stable meaning, no fixed ground
3 – human beings are fragmented battlefields for competing ideologies whose only identities are the ones we invent and choose to believe
Literature is also dynamic, unstable, and ambiguous
Meaning is created by the reader in the act of reading
We create the meaning and value we find in the text
Two reasons in deconstructing literary texts 1 – to reveal its undecidability
To reveal a text’s undecidability is to show that the meaning of the text is really an indefinite, undecidable, plural, conflicting array of possible meanings and that the text has no meaning in the traditional sense.
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