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Deconstruction

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Deconstruction is what many people think of when they hear the terms "literary theory." It was also the first introduction of many departments and scholars to the idea that their methodology (how they approached their subjects of study) could be called something called "theory." Our class covers many writers and schools of thought before WWII and definitely before the 1980s, when translations of Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) work became more readily available in English.

What is it then?


Stevens defines '''deconstruction''' as "a critical approach developed by Jacques Derrida and others that seeks to reveal the 'constructedness' of literary texts, philosophical concepts, and other matters" (259).

Deconstructionists, she points out, "tend to be interested in the play of language and of form and tend not to pay as much attention to issues of historical context" (154). While Structuralism is grounded in linguists, deconstruction is deeply concerned with philosophy, especially concerning ethics and phenomenology. Derrida draws largely on nineteenth-century European philosophers, such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Edmund Husserl, and Martin Heidegger.

In Writing about Literature: A Guide for the Student Critic (2nd Edition, Broadview Press), W.F. Garrett-Petts offers an explanation that draws upon its contrasts with New Criticism:

New Critical inquiry and deconstruction are usually regarded as philosophical opposites: one seeks to find textual coherence by finding ''unity of effect'' among the formal elements; the other seeks to unravel any pretense of textual unity. In practice, however, both approaches stress close-reading techniques (emphasis original, 59).


How can approaches that focus on form and close reading be considered so very different from one another?
The New Critics, you remember, often referred to their work as "natural," "universal," or striving to be free of bias. Think about what you read by Eliot, Booth, Wimsatt and Beardsley. What terms did they use to describe their readings of texts?

How to do a deconstructivist reading

Parker explains that this approach focuses on a double reading, where first a dominant ideology is found but then undermined by the second reading. Two interpretations remain key but are not enough: "the first reading must propose a stable interpretation, and then the second reading must undo that stable interpretation through an unstable reading that brings out more multiplicity in the interpreted object or text" (89). You are looking for internal contradictions or internal differences (Parker 93).

A deconstructionist rejects the idea of a "natural" or unbiased reading, as well as the idea of universals. As Garrett-Petts puts it: Deconstruction promotes an 'unnatural' reading process, one designed to interrogate the text's premises and make the reader uncomfortable with ''prior assumptions, hierarchies,''and ''binary oppositions.'' In other words, deconstruction asks us to question the basis of our predictions. Deconstruction gives attention to those 'unlikely alternatives' made invisible by more conventional reading strategies. To goal here is to find the meaning beneath the meaning--or to show that the text doesn't really mean what many think it means"(emphasis original, 60).


He also offers a nice summary of Thomas Fink's guide to deconstructing a text:

From Garrett-Petts (61, this is pretty much a direct quotation, but I have altered and abridged it to better suit our class):

Preliminary Phase

Phase One

Phase Two


The thesis you come up with in a deconstructionist reading should point to the fluidity of meaning: identity, ideology, etc. are unstable categories. There is not a fixed meaning.

Lois Tyson, in yet another student guide to literary theory, explains:

Deconstruction .. asks us to look at the sentence's ambiguities, even when the sentence seems, at first glance, as clear and specific as this one does. When the speaker says, 'This tree is big,' is she comparing the tree to herself? To another tree? What other tree? Is she supposed by the size of the tree?...Or is she being sarcastic?... This string of questions may seem to push the point a bit far, but it does illustrate that human utterances are rarely, if ever, as clear and simple as the structuralist formula ''signifier + signified'' seems to imply. ... we could rewrite the structuralist formula as ''sign = signifier + signified ... + signified'' That is, we could try to explain communication as a sliding accumulation of signifieds. But was does the term ''signified'' mean?... What structuralism calls the signified is really always a chain of signifiers (238).


She outlines two key questions a deconstructionist would ask of a text.
From Tyson (251):
One more from Tyson (256):

Deconstruction and Poststructuralism

Does much of this sound familiar? Similar to the poststructuralism we associated with Barthes?
There is a lot of overlap between those two categories to the point that it may not be that useful to focus a lot of energy on differentiating them. As Stevens points out, "Derrida can be thought of as a radical phenomenologist, or an heir to the existentialist, as well as a poststructuralist" (155).

A Bit on Derrida


Deconstructionist Keywords

Related Schools of Thought

Keywords from Earlier Chapters

Figurative Language

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  1. Formalist Approaches Emily MN Kugler