Deconstruction - in Literary Criticism

By Ingrid- Melody

English Letters, Universitas Ma Chung

Deconstruction’s view of language(Derrida)

‘language is not the reliable tool of communication…’

Deconstruction’s theory of language

based on the belief that language is much more slippery and ambiguous.

e.g. (old saying)Time flies like an arrow = Times passed quickly.

Time = nounflies = verblike an arrow = adv. clause

e.g. (additional meanings 1)Time flies like an arrow = Get out your stopwatch and time the speed of flies as you’d time an arrow’s flight.

Time = verbflies = obj.like an arrow = adv. clause

e.g. (additional meanings 2)Time flies like an arrow = Time flies are fond of arrows (or at least of one particular arrow).

Time flies = nounlike = verban arrow = obj.

Slippery quality of language

• changes in tone of voice and emphasis

• meaning changes dramatically

e.g.

The formula of basic element of communication

Word as linguistic sign

e.g.Picture a person standing in an open field pointing to the only tree in sight.

signifiers (single) = this tree is bigsignified (clear) = only one tree

Communication is such a complicated and uncertain thing

• deconstruction look at the sentence’s ambiguities, even when the sentence seems, at first glance, as clear and specific.

• any given signifier can refer to any number of signifieds at any given moment.

Language for deconstruction

• language consists only of chains of signifiers.• language is nonreferential because it refers

to the play of signifiers of which language itself consist.

• language is what forms us and there is no way to get beyond it.

• language is wholly ideological• language is ‘ground of being’• language has implications for subjectivity

(human being)

The important characteristics in language

• its play of signifiers continually defers, or postpones, meaning.

• the meaning seems to have the result of the differences by which we distinguish one signifier from another.

Binary opposition hierarchies

• the pair is always privileged, or considered superior to the other.

• examine the ways which two members of the opposition share some things in common.

Deconstruction as poststructuralist theory

• it emerged in the wake of structuralism’s popularity

• it constitutes a reaction against structuralism’s orderly vision of language and human experience.

Deconstructing Literature

The three main points we’ve discussed:

For deconstruction,1. Language is dynamic, ambiguous, and

unstable, continually disseminating2. Existence has no center, no stable

meaning, no fixed ground3. Human being are fragmented

battlefields for competing ideologies whose only “identities” are the ones we invent and choose to believe.

So…

For deconstruction, literature is as dynamic, ambiguous, and unstable

as the language of which it is composed.

Literary text, like all texts, consist of a multiplicity of overlapping,

conflicting meanings in dynamic, fluid relation to one another and to

us.

There are two reasons to deconstruct literature:

1. to reveal the text’s undecidability and/or

2. to reveal the complex operations of the ideologies of which the text is constructed.

• Deconstructive critics believe meaning in literature is created during the act of reading a text.

• It is precisely while the reader is reading that moments of meaning are created, but inevitably give way to even more meanings, each new reading creating its own unique meaning ad infinitum.

• This is why Tyson says art and literature is "a seething cauldron of meanings in flux," because there can be a large range of meanings within a text therefore the ultimate meaning is undecidable.

Undecidability means that reader and text alike are inextricably

bound within language’s dissemination of meanings. That is, reader and text are

interwoven threads in the perpetually working loom of

language

How can we prove undecidability:

1. note all the various interpretations- of characters, events, images, and so on- the text seems to offer;

2. show the ways in which these interpretations conflict with one another;

3. show how these conflicts produce still more interpretations, which produce still more conflicts, which produce still more interpretations;

4. use steps 1, 2, 3, to argue for the text’s “undecidability”

The following two questions summarize the two deconstructive approaches discussed above:

1. How we can use the various conflicting interpretations a text produces (the “play of meanings”) or find the various ways in which the text doesn’t answer the questions it seems to answer, to demonstrate the instability of language and the undecidability of meaning?

2. What ideology does the text seem to promote-what is its main theme-and how does conflicting evidence in the text show the limitations of that ideology? We can usually discover a text’s overt ideological project by finding the binary opposition(S) that structure the text’s main theme(s).

• Keep in mind that not all deconstructive critics will interpret the same work in the same way, even if they focus on the same ideological projects in the text.

• As in every yield, even expert practitioners disagree. Our goal is to use deconstruction to help enrich our reading of literary text, to help us see some important ideas they illustrate that we might not have seen so clearly or so deeply without deconstruction, and to help us see the ways in which language blinds us to the ideologies it embodies.

• As we noted earlier, because deconstruction helps us understand the hidden operations of ideology, it can be a useful tool for any critic interested in examining the oppressive role ideology can play in our lives.

Questions for further practice

1. What does this ideological conflict suggest about the difficulties involved in the attempt to avoid stereotypes or about the difficulty any oppressed group might have asserting its own identity in the face of prejudice?

2. How does Kate Chopin’s “The Storm” (1898) forward its theme of the importance of sexual fulfillment for women, which seems to be the story’s overt ideological project? How does the text’s use of nature imagery and the standard fairy-tale happy ending both promote and undermine this project? What does this ideological conflict imply about the story’s attempt to transcend the nineteenth-century social values of the culture it represents?

3. How might we account for the apparent failure of the American public to recognize this very different reading of the poem?

4. Then show how the novel deconstructs this ideological project by finding, in the text, the ways in which nature does not live up to this definition. Speculate on the reasons why this ideological conflict is present in this text.

5. How might William Blake’s “The Little Black Boy” (1789) provide an example of deconstruction’s notion of undecidability? Specifically, how does the poem seem to promote the mutually exclusive themes of racial equality, the superiority of white people to black people, and the superiority of black people to white people? What are the implications of this apparent ideological conflict?

Sankyuu

sources

• Tyson, Lois – Critical Theory Today.pdf