2. Beginnings
• started in France
• Started by Jacques
Derida
• Made waves in 1966
• Derida coined the word
Differance, meaning you
cannot ever reconcile the
multiple meanings held in
a text.
• Of Grammatology is
considered the
deconstructionist Bible.
3. → questions the fundamental conceptual distinctions, or
“oppositions,” in Western philosophy through a close
examination of the language and logic of philosophical and
literary texts.
→ Deconstruction’s reception was coloured by its intellectual
predecessors, most notably structuralism and New Criticism.
→Deconstruction offered a powerful critique of the possibility
of creating detached, scientific metalanguages and was thus
categorized (along with kindred efforts) as “post-structuralist.”
→ sought to understand verbal works of art (especially poetry)
as complex constructions made up of different and
contrasting levels of literal and nonliteral meanings, and it
emphasized the role of paradox and irony in these artifacts.
Definition:
4. → 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.
→ They generally examined the individual work not as a self-
contained artifact but as a product of relations with other texts
or discourses, literary and non-literary.
→ 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.
→Post-structuralism holds that there are many truths, that
frameworks must bleed, and that structures must become
unstable or decentered.
Definition:
5. Advantages:
• The reader is encouraged to question traditional
assumptions and prejudices.
• Can help us to question and revise everything we're told
about the world—our received ideas.
7. • Time (noun) flies (verb) like an arrow (adverb
clause) = Time passes quickly.
• Time (verb) flies (object) like an arrow (adverb
clause) = Get out your stopwatch and time the
speed of flies as you would time an arrow's flight.
• Time flies (noun) like (verb) an arrow (object) =
Time flies are fond of arrows (or at least of one
particular arrow).
9. 1. How is language thrown into freeplay or questioned in the
work?
2. How does the work undermine or contradict generally
accepted truths?
3. How does the author (or a character) omit, change, or
reconstruct memory and identity?
4. How does a work fulfill or move outside the established
conventions of its genre?
5. How does the work deal with the separation (or lack thereof)
between writer, work, and reader?
6. What ideology does the text seem to promote?
7. What is left out of the text that if included might undermine
the goal of the work?
8. If we changed the point of view of the text - say from one
character to another, or multiple characters - how would the
story change? Whose story is not told in the text? Who is left
out and why might the author have omitted this character's
tale?
10. Example Literary Texts
Snow
By Frederick Seidel
Snow is what it does.
It falls and it stays and it goes.
It melts and it is here somewhere.
Source: Poetry (September so the opposite could be 2012).
11. Example Literary Texts
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.
