Literary

Criticism: A
look Into
Deconstruction
What is Deconstruction?
• Textual analysis method: a method of analyzing
texts based on the ideas that language is inherently
unstable and shifting and that the reader rather
than the author is central in determining meaning.
• It is a radical approach to reading.
• This literary criticism is not fully
developed.
• Explained as a strategy “Rules for
reading, interpretation and writing.”
• The founder of deconstruction is Jacques
Derrida.
 History
Historyof
ofDeconstruction
Deconstruction

•Rene Descartes (1596-1650)

and Fredrick Nietzsche (1844-
1900) were pioneers in
deconstruction.
• They began to question the
objective truth of language.
• This is also known as
Poststructuralist, this criticism
came after structuralism.
 Structuralism
• This is the prelude to
Deconstruction.
• It is a science that seeks
to understand how a
system works, In this
case, Language.
• The structure of
language comes from
the human mind.
 Ferdinand de Saussure

• Looked at language
Diachronically.
• He traced words over time
looking or the changes in
sounds and meanings.
 Rules of Language
These rules of language were developed by
Ferdinand de Saussure.
• Langue - Language is made of a set of rules,
known
as this.
• Parole - General rules of language applied by
members of a specific community.
• Signs – He depicted language as a set of signs,
that came in two parts the Signifier and the
Signified
 Signified and Signifier in
Deconstruction
• Signifier – The written and sound
construction that makes up a word
• Signified – The meaning of the word.
•Deconstruction looks at the ambiguities
in signifiers, and states that there can be
many different signified meanings for a
single signifier.
Binary Oppositions
•The most important part of
Deconstruction.
•This literary criticism uses
Binary Oppositions to
look at what is not in a
story.
•Of the two parts of binary
oppositions, There is a
dominant and a oppressed
or non-dominant.
Deconstructive Analysis
•In a Deconstructive analysis you are looking to
reverse the dominant and non-dominant binary
oppositions.
•Giving the privileged status to the oppressed of
the two Binary opposites.
•Tries to find blind spots in the literature.
•Derrida derived this method because “By
deconstructing constraints, he tried to open new
ways of thinking and knowing”(Dobie)
Poem Deconstruction – Snow
Snow
By Frederick Seidel

Snow is what it does.

It falls and it stays and it goes.
It melts and it is here
somewhere.
We all will get there.

Source: Poetry (September

2012).
 Six Lines for Louise Bogan
By Michael Collier

All that has tamed me I have learned

to love
and lost that wildness that was
once beloved.
All that was loved I’ve learned to tame
and lost the beloved that once
was wild.
All that is wild is tamed by love—
and the beloved (wildness) that
once was loved.

Source: Poetry (April 2012).