1. Post-Structuralism/Deconstruction

2. Post-Structuralist Tenets
A reaction against the perceived authoritarianism of Structuralism
Language itself is an issue: our tool for making meaning is ambiguous and arbitrary; language is imperfect, slippery; meanings change; tension exists between denotation and connotation
Because language has this quality, it can be contradictory.

3. Post-Structuralist Tenets
Because authors cannot control their language, texts reveal more than their authors are aware of.
Deconstructionists are interested in what is below the surface of the text: the subtext. They want to peer behind the text's "disguises."

4. The Text
"The text seems to be about…, but really it is about…."

5. Deconstructionists are interested in the world outside the text and its influence on the text. This interest provides common ground with many other literary critics.

6. Texts can contain contradictory meanings.
Rather than resolving a text's contradictions, paradoxes, and ambiguities (as a Formalist would), Deconstructionists use those aspects to show there is no single, authoritative reading, but rather meanings to be actively created by the reader.
These inconsistencies may expose what appears to be the dominant "reading" and actually undermine it.

7. Jacques Derrida ( ): As a response to Structuralism and Formalism, he asserts that the meaning of all texts is undecidable.

8. Derrida
attacks Structuralism's dependence on binary oppositions; asserts that in a binary opposition, one is always privileged over the other (examples: “black/white"; "man/woman"; "heterosexual/homosexual")
aims to destabilize hierarchies, upset the dominance of one term in a binary opposition

9. One who looks for a single meaning in a text is imprisoned by it.