In the United States, the Critical Legal Studies movement applied deconstruction to legal writing in an effort to reveal conflicts between principles and counterprinciples in legal theory. It is a theory of literary criticism that questions traditional assumptions about certainty, identity, and truth; asserts that words can only refer to other words; and attempts to demonstrate how statements about any text subvert their own meanings. Others accused it of being ahistorical and apolitical. The following entry discusses deconstruction theory as a method of critical analysis of philosophical and literary texts. Derrida challenged the conventional cultural markers of…. This perspective was influential in gay and lesbian studies, or “queer theory,” as the academic avant-garde linked to movements of gay liberation styled itself. Deconstructive readings, in contrast, treated works of art not as the harmonious fusion of literal and figurative meanings but as instances of the intractable conflicts between meanings of different types. The work of Judith Butler, for example, challenged the claim that feminist politics requires a distinct identity for women. Despite such attacks, deconstruction has had an enormous impact on a variety of intellectual enterprises. Deconstruction is a method of literary analysis that challenges our comfortable assumptions. Shift your focus a little, and you'll see the spaces between the frame's 'bones.' As J. Hillis Miller, the preeminent American deconstructionist, has explained in an essay entitled Stevens’ Rock and Criticism as Cure (1976), “Deconstruction is not a dismantling of the structure of a text, but a demonstration that it has already dismantled itself. Deconstructionists, by contrast, see works in terms of their undecidability. Derrida did not believe that structuralists could explain the laws governing human signification and thus provide the key to understanding the form and meaning of everything from an African village to Greek myth to a literary text. Deconstruction is a poststructuralist theory, based largely but not exclusively on the writings of Derrida. Literary Theories - A Guide: Deconstruction Provides links to a variety of mostly free resource information about various literary theories. Deconstruction was both created and has been profoundly influenced by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida. Categories: Linguistics, Literary Criticism, Literary Theory, Uncategorized, Tags: Deconstruction, Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, Stevens' Rock and Criticism as Cure. Formalists ultimately make sense of the ambiguities they find in a given text, arguing that every ambiguity serves a definite, meaningful, and demonstrable literary function. Its impact on literature, mediated in North America largely through the influences of theorists at Yale University, is based. Deconstruction is an apparent revolution against all the literary theories before itself which vouch for a unity in the literary texts. Some philosophers, especially those in the Anglo-American tradition, dismissed it as obscurantist wordplay whose major claims, when intelligible, were either trivial or false. It is in the first instance a philosophical theory and a theory directed towards the (re)reading of philosophical writings. Similarly, deconstructionlooks at what makes a text whole and what holes are in between its piec… Deconstruction and some analogue of its operation are, however, today not confined to just the fields of literature and philosophy. Some strands of feminist thinking engaged in a deconstruction of the opposition between “man” and “woman” and critiqued essentialist notions of gender and sexual identity. Deconstruction tends to be used in literary theory in arguments between and among theorists about the value of their theories, rather than about the value of the texts under discussion. Deconstruction initially translates a term coined by the French philosopher (and arch-deconstructionist) Jacques Derrida. Lecturer in English PSC Solved Question Paper, Jacques Derrida: Transcendental Signified, Postmodernism – Literary Theory and Criticism Notes, Helene Cixous and Poststructuralist Feminist Theory – Literary Theory and Criticism Notes, Key Theories of Wayne C. Booth – Literary Theory and Criticism Notes, Key Theories of Jacques Derrida – Literary Theory and Criticism Notes, The Philosophy of Jacques Derrida | Literary Theory and Criticism, Understanding Postmodernism – Harsh Vardhan Maya, The Inequalities Beneath The Pandemic - African Feminism (AF), Response [Redux: The Skinny Legend]: South Korea and “All I Got Was This Lousy Eating Disorder” – Roll for Relapse. In the United States in the 1970s and ’80s, deconstruction played a major role in the animation and transformation of literary studies by literary theory (often referred to simply as “theory”), which was concerned with questions about the nature of language, the production of meaning, and the relationship between literature and the numerous discourses that structure human experience and its histories. Deconstruction: School of philosophy and literary criticism forged in the writings of the French philosopher Jacques Derrida and the Belgium/North American literary critic Paul De Man.Deconstruction can perhaps best be described as a theory of reading which aims … Deconstruction, form of philosophical and literary analysis, derived mainly from work begun in the 1960s by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, that questions the fundamental conceptual distinctions, or “oppositions,” in Western philosophy through a close examination of the language and logic of philosophical and literary texts. Its impact on literature, mediated in North America largely through the influences of theorists at Yale University, is based Although its ultimate aim may be to criticize Western logic, deconstruction arose as a response to structuralism and formalism. Be on the lookout for your Britannica newsletter to get trusted stories delivered right to your inbox. Structuralists believed that all elements of human culture, including literature, may be understood as parts of a system of signs. Barbara Johnson and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak , for example, both translators of Derrida’s work, were instrumental in bringing Deconstruction into Feminism , Psychoanalysis , and the critique of gender … It's the 'whole' of the metal itself and the 'holes' in between that make up the future building's shape. Deconstructionism and literature If you're seeing this message, it means we're having trouble loading external resources on our website. It seeks to find the differences, contradictions, paradoxes, ambiguity and disintegration (in short, loopholes) in the text. Though Deconstruction is primarily understood as a theory of TEXTUALITY and as a method for reading texts, it constitutes for many a radically new way of seeing and knowing the world. Though a deconstructive reading can reveal the incompatible possibilities generated by the text, it is impossible for the reader to settle on any permanent meanings. Premium Membership is now 50% off! The resources are in a variety of formats: Websites, PDF, videos, PowerPoint, RSS feeds, Podcasts, etc. Formalist critics, such as the New Critics, assume that a work of literature is a freestanding, self-contained object whose meaning can be found in the complex network of relations between its parts (allusions, images, rhythms, sounds, etc.). Deconstruction’s reception was coloured by its intellectual predecessors, most notably structuralism and New Criticism. In all the fields it influenced, deconstruction called attention to rhetorical and performative aspects of language use, and it encouraged scholars to consider not only what a text says but also the relationship—and potential conflict—between what a text says and what it “does.” In various disciplines, deconstruction also prompted an exploration of fundamental oppositions and critical terms and a reexamination of ultimate goals. As a result, deconstructionists see texts as more radically heterogeneous than do formalists. …the challenge of postmodernism and deconstruction been felt more keenly than in the history of ideas. In psychoanalysis, deconstructive readings of texts by Sigmund Freud and others drew attention to the role of language in the formation of the psyche; showed how psychoanalytic case studies are shaped by the kinds of psychic mechanisms that they purport to analyze (thus, Freud’s writings are themselves organized by processes of repression, condensation, and displacement); and questioned the logocentric presuppositions of psychoanalytic theory.