How to PractiseDeconstruction

When approaching a text with deconstructing or post-structuralist intentions, remember

that basically what youre looking for is whatever lies behind, beside, beyond the structure/s
and centre/s the text seems to favour. Or, another way of putting this, what youre looking for
is the manners in which the text challenges, undermines, deconstructs the structure/s and
centre/s that may seem (have seemed) privileged.
1. Therefore, a logical first step would be to identify these favoured structures and centres.

What time, place, social group, aesthetic, and/or moral, political and economic

premises look privileged or bear traces (in a Derridean sense) of privilege?

Identify the markers (linguistic, social, cultural, etc.) through which this centre is
suggested.

In those same markers, try to identify different meanings (for e.g., if whiteness seems
to be privileged, is there anything in the way in which whiteness is written that might
mean something different and, as a result, challenge the previously privileged reading
of whiteness?).

Starting from these differences, try to find new potential (if necessarily partial)
centres of the text and explore one or two of these different interpretations.

2. Simultaneously with or subsequent to 1. above, identify what seems to be treated as

marginal or devalued.
What time, place, social group, aesthetic, and/or moral, political and economic
premises seem to be excluded, undervalued or devalued?
Identify the ways in which the exclusion is signalled.
Explore the manner in which the very exclusion or the ways in which it is signalled
could promote these elements as alternative centres (for e.g., if the black race is
marginalised, how is this signalled and is there anything suggesting that the
marginalisation is actually a means of both de-centring and re-centring the text?).
3. You could also go about this in terms of wholes and holes (cf. Rob Pope, The English
Studies Book, 1998, p. 131):
What seems to be the text as a whole, complete and unified (e.g., a story about the
superiority of the white race)?

 Then try to identify holes in the whole, through which to perceive fragments of
other worlds/languages/systems, etc.
How do the latter challenge/de-centre and re-centre the former?