Deconstruction

DECONSTRUCTION
provides a way of playing with language and meaning that teases and delights it is a strategy, some rules of reading, interpretation, and writing says Jacques Derrida (1930-2004)

Historical Background
known as poststructuralism

its predecessors, both structuralism --- the movement that it both incorporates and undermines --- and those that structuralism itself challenged
it challenges the way Western civilization has conceived of the world since Plato.

Historical Background

Historical Background
refusing to accept the truth of anything without grounds for believing it to be true Rene Descartes (1596-1650) proved his own existence. Cogito ergo sum, he declared. Meaning I think therefore I am. through the use of reasons, progress was possible, perhaps inevitable

Historical Background
a radical re-visioning of reality took place in a wide variety of disciplines such as physics, linguistics, antropology, and psychology

Historical Background

Historical Background
in philosophy, Friedrich Nietzsche (18441900) announced the death of God by which he meant that human beings were no longer able to sustain belief

without God there would be no cosmic order or universal moral law that bound all human beings

Historical Background
human beings to develop their creative powers in this world, not the next

he believed humankind could exercise newly found freedom that would liberate the human spirit
a superman (the Ubermensch) who would be strong and independent, freed from all values except those he deemed to be valid

Historical Background
Nietzsches denial of an ultimate reality that is static, unified and absolute replaced by an understanding of the worlds relativistic, dynamic and open.

Albert Einstein (1879-1995) published a

paper that changed understanding of time, space, and reality.

Historical Background
a time that all clocks measure the concept of absolute time was replaced with that time of motion.

Historical Background
language had been viewed as a transparent medium through which reality could set down accurately and shaped into an aesthetic form

literature was taken to be mimetic, reflecting, and presenting truths about life and human condition

Historical Background
formalists (the New Critics, as distinguished from the Russian formalists), saw poem as a self-sufficient
object possessing unity and form and operating within its own rules to resolve ambiguities, ironies, and paradoxes

Historical Background
formalists sought to determine not what the poem means but how it means an occasional doubter complained about the cold, unemotional nature of the formalists close readings

Historical Background
phenomenological critics, who rejected
the formalists inability (or unwillingness) to question for readers know a literary work, as exemplified by their refusal to investigate the authors intentions

Historical Background
who believe that meaning resides not in physical objects but in human consciousness as the object in registered in it, emphasize the reader in making literature a text cannot exist separate from the individual mind that perceives it.

Historical Background
it can be explained as an effect on the reader, and that effect will be different for each reader because of the unique experiences each brings to the reading. readers are called upon to supply missing material, to fill textual gaps relative, dynamic and open

Structuralism
a science that seeks to understand how systems work things cannot be understood individually they have to be seen as part of a larger structure to which they belong

Structuralism
structuralists collect observable information about an item or practice in order to discover the laws that govern it

he or she does not view objects or behavior in isolation but as part of a larger system

Structuralism
structuralists are looking not for structures in a physical sense but for patterns that underlie human behavior, experience, and creation structure comes from the human mind as it works to make sense of its world the minds defense is to sort and classify, make rules of process --- that is, to create structure

Structuralism
conceptual systems that make it possible for individuals to distinguish one type of object from another or to differentiate among members of the same category

placed meaning in the mind of human being rather than in external, objective reality

Structuralism
language , not sense experience or modes of consciousness, shapes who we are, what we think, and what we understand reality to be

Ferdinand de Saussure

Ferdinand de Saussure
structuralist approach

diachronically --- tracing how words evolved in meaning or sound over time
language was mimetic --- not a system with its own governing rules but one that reflected the world

Ferdinand de Saussure
a word was a symbol that was equal to the object or concept it represented Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (18571913) began to use a synchronic approach, a method that was deemed to be a more scientific study of language
looking at a language at one particular time (as opposed to over a period of time)

Ferdinand de Saussure
his work seemed to be the potential to discover basic principles of language and culture that could explain human behavior

language is a system that has its own internal rules of operations

Ferdinand de Saussure
langue, and he referred to the applications that members of a particular speech community make of those rules in their interactions as parole langue, sometimes referred to as a grammar, is the system within which individual verbalizations have meaning parole refers to the individual verbalizations

Ferdinand de Saussure
the language system is that of signs

written or sound construction known as the

signifier
its meaning is called the signified

Ferdinand de Saussure
the spoken or written form of hat for example is a signifier

the concept that flashes into your mind when you hear or read it is the signified a signifier is a concept in mind, it is a language, and not the world external to us, that meditates our reality

How do a signifier and a signified tied together?

The relationship comes about through convention, an agreement on the part of speakers that the two are associated

bat is distinguished from hat

Language then is arbitrary, conventional, and based on experience.

Ferdinand de Saussure
a science called semiology that would investigate meaning through signs observable in cultural phenomena indentifying the law that governs signs would make it possible to explain the social behavior and cultural practices of human

Ferdinand de Saussure
in the United States, Charles Sanders Pierce was developing semiotics it is the study of sign systems that are defined by structure of their interrelationships it is valuable in studying phenomena as parate as Barbie dolls and the mythologies of little-known cultures

Ferdinand de Saussure
the structuralist reader will look for the system to which the work belongs
the author is a little interest to the structuralist reader because a text is not deemed to be an authors own vision but rather a part of a system to which it belongs, a system by which it governed.

Ferdinand de Saussure
they seek to connect a text with a larger structure, such as genre or some universal narrative form. they often establish connections with other texts that have similar patterns or motifs structuralist criticism is left open to charges that is not primarily a literary strategy

Claude Levi-Strauss

Claude Levi-Strauss
a French anthropologist who in the 1950s began to use structuralist principles to study cultures each myth is a single instance of a universal law of human thought

to prove his assertion, he studied individual myths (the parole) in search of the structural elements they share --- i.e, the larger system to which they belong (the langue)

Claude Levi-Strauss
smallest structural elements of myths as mythemes, phonemes in linguistics, the smallest sound in a language, according to Saussure both are minimal building blocks

Roman Jakobson
narrative as organizations of paired opposites referred to as dyadic pairs, often referred to as binary oppositions

contrasting concepts such as male/female, right/left, day/night

Claude Levi-Strauss
It is not only myths that follow universal laws. All human thought, he declared, obeys universal law

Roland Barthes

Roland Barthes
Roland Barthes (1915-1980) was another cultural anthropologists who lived and worked in France at the same time as Claude Levi-Strauss
Applied structuralist principles to social practices and public figures of modern-day France in an effort to find their meaning (their langue)

Roland Barthes
His lengthy analysis of Balzacs short story Sarrasine, entitled S/Z, that he is best known 561 lexies, or units of meaning, then classified them into five codes that he deemed to constitute the basic structure of all stories
All sentences are governed by an identifiable set of grammar structures

Roland Barthes
Proairetic code, which includes indications of actions Hermeneutic code, which poses questions that provide suspense Cultural code, which includes references to common knowledge

Roland Barthes
Semic code, which reveals character and theme
Symbolic code, which also deals with theme, but it does through contrasting elements such as love and hate, life and death, male and female

Roland Barthes
narratives are built on binary oppositions to determine the meaning of a story requires that a reader note the binary oppositions in the next, observe their interactions and relationships, and thereby decode meaning it ignores the author , the genre, and the literary schools and periods

Vladimir Propp

Vladimir Propp
A Russian formalist critic, narratology Principally concerned with the narrative structure of a text His investigation of Russian fairy tales published in 1928 as Morphology of the Folk Tale It was influential in Claude Levi-Strausss studies of myths

Vladimir Propp
All folk tales are constructed around 31 narratives functions --- i.e., possible actions that always appear in the sequence he listed #11, the hero leaves home ; #12, the hero and the villain join in the direct combat ; #31, the hero is married and ascends the throne

Vladimir Propp
No single tale will use all 31 functions but their order is fixed simply because events must unfold according to natural sequence

Vladimir Propp
Seven spheres of actions Villain, provider, helper, princess, dispatcher, hero, and false hero What is missing is any concern for literary style, authorial individuality, point of view, or social-historical relevance

Jonathan Culler

Jonathan Culler
structuralism arrived in the United States in the 1980s, Jonathan Culler (1944-) leading the charge Structuralist Poetics (1975) it is a reader who makes structures and meanings in a text.

Jonathan Culler
past experiences allow an individual to construct assumptions and expectations that make it possible for them to make sense of what they read.

Jonathan Culler
Deconstruction, a product of the late 1960s, extended structuralist ideas about the nature of the sign, the importance of difference and binary oppositions, and the role of language in mediating experience, sometimes in ways that contradicted structuralist theories.

Jonathan Culler
Poststructuralists: objected that the structuralist interpretations of texts are too static and unchanging, producing readings that posit fixed meanings texts are fluid, dynamic entities that are given new life with repeated readings and through interactions with other texts, providing an onngoing plurality of meanings

Jonathan Culler
in a single text one can find many meanings, all of them possible and all of them replaceable by others looks for those places where texts contradict, and thereby deconstruct, themselves. a literary work can no longer have one unifying meaning that an authhority (critic or author) can enunciate.

Jonathan Culler
structuralists assume a scientific stance, which is reflected in the detached tone of their writing and their tendency to discuss abstract topics poststructuralists tend to more passionate and emotional

Jonathan Culler
in many peoples minds, deconstruction remains closely associated with (and is sometimes referred to as) the Yale school of criticism It give us a way to read more critically and honestly than previous systems have allowed us to do.

Jonathan Culler
It also provides a means of discovering premises and ideologies that lurk unacknowledged in the language we use.