1. Let’s answer the following
1. It seeks to understand the impact of a work in its day, and it
may also explore how meaning change over time.
2. It is an approach which evaluate great works of art from poor
works of art.
3. What will a formalist calls those great work of art.
4. It is an art or practice of judging and commenting on the
qualities and character of literary works
5. It is n approach which explores how time and place of
creation affect meaning in the work
3. Deconstruction/ Deconstructive Criticism
It resembles formalist criticism in its close attention to
the text, its close analysis of individual words and
images.
There similarities ends there for the formalist critic is
interested in “aesthetic wholes” or constructs while
deconstructionists aims to demonstrate
irreconcilable position- they destruct ( or
deconstruct)- by proving the instability of the
language, its inability to express anything definite.
4. Deconstructive critics believe that language doesn’t
accurately reflect reality because it’s an unstable
medium; literary text therefore have no stable
meaning.
They also reject the traditional assumption that
language can accurately represent reality. For them
language is a fundamentally unstable medium
therefore a literary texts, which are made of words,
have no fixed, single meaning.
5. Deconstructionist according to critic Paul de Man, insists on
the impossibility of making the actual expression
with what has to express, of making the actual signs
coincide with what is signified.
The deconstructionist approach attempts to show the texts
“deconstruct,” or how it can be broken down into
irreconcilable positions.
Deconstructionist reject the notion that the critic should
endorse the myth of authorial control over language.
6. Deconstructionist critic like Roland Barthes and Michel
Foucault introduces “the death of the author” and “the
death of literature”
Death of the author- the rejection of the assumption that
the author(no matter how ingenious), can fully control the
meaning of the text.
Death of literature- poems and novels are merely words on
a page that deserve no privileged status as art; all text are
created equal- equally untrustworthy.
7. Deconstructionist focus on how language is used to
achieve power.
They believe that “there are no truths, only rival
interpretations” that is why they try to understand how
some interpretations come to be regarded as truth.
The major goal of deconstruction is to demonstrate
how those supposed truths are at best provisional
at worst contradictory.
