The document outlines various literary theories including liberal humanism, structuralism, and deconstruction, emphasizing how literature conveys meaning and the importance of questioning established assumptions about identity, language, and cultural constructs. It discusses the ways in which these theories can inform both the interpretation of texts and the teaching of literature, particularly in relation to concepts such as gender, race, and the authority of the author. Additionally, it raises the challenge for Christian scholars of literature to navigate between traditional interpretations and contemporary theoretical frameworks.

1. • Journal entries due next Friday

2. • What are the assumptions you make when
reading literature? Are words clear?
• What are the assumptions you make when you
are talking about literature with another person?
• What do you hope to impart to a classmate or a
potential student when you talk about literature?

3. • What are the assumptions you make when reading literature?
• What are the assumptions you make when you are talking about literature
with another person, or are teaching literature?
• What do you hope to impart to a classmate or a potential student when you
talk about literature?
• Language is stable and has meaning we can all agree on.
• The author is in control of the text she or he writes.
• Works of literature are internally consistent, meaning that a text has a
contained meaning that we can interpret with interpretative literary
tools.
• Works of literature have external relevance—they have meaning for
us.
• You can take the author’s or poet’s word for what he or she writes.

4. Liberal Humanism: A View of Literature
• Good literature is of timeless significance.
• The text will reveal constants and universal
truths about human nature because human
nature itself is constant and unchanging.
• The subject is the free, unconstrained author
of meaning—his actions are rooted in choice
• Claims to be universal (but potentially
confirms the concerns and ideals of the ruling
class): “Macbeth is of profound importance to
those who study the role of power.” Or The
Tempest is about the power of art.

5. Structuralism/Post-structuralism/Deconstruction
• Almost all contemporary literary theory,
literary pedagogy, and discussions in the
Arts and Humanities are premised on
these philosophies.
• We cannot but help employ their
methodologies when we discuss literature.
• Key names: Ferdinand Saussure, Roland
Barthes, and Jacques Derrida

6. Construct
• When we say gender or race or class is a construct, we
mean that, as noted in Barry, “language constitutes our
world, it doesn’t just record or label it” (42).
• “Meaning is always attributed to the object or idea by the
human mind, and constructed and expressed through
language; it is not already contained within the thing” (42).
• We assemble a set of beliefs and assumptions that we
have built, or constructed, over time and experience.
• We discussed last time how concepts of “gender” are
largely, if not entirely, cultural constructs, effected by the
omnipresent patriarchal biases.
• Women are shaped by the patriarchal gaze: men look at
women who look at themselves.

7. • Meaning is constructed.
• Therefore, it can be deconstructed.

9. • It is an animal
• Is it a dog? No, so its meaning
is partly premised on what it is
not.
• What kind of cat is it? Is it a
lion?

10. • We are always trying to trace
back meaning, and meaning is
supposed to be able to go back
to some referent
• Fullness/presence dependency/absence
God creation (no sense
apart from Go)
Good Evil (evil lack of good)
White black (Other)
Man Woman (made from
man, filled by man)

11. Structuralism argues that meaning in language derives from its
internal logic and formal relationships. We can say, “I see the
dog,” but we can’t say, “Dog see I the,” without leaving a
listener clueless as to what we mean, even though each word is
understandable and familiar. The order of the words and their
relationship to one another, i.e. the structure of the sentence,
conveys the meaning.
Semiotics, as a part of Structuralism, argues that language is a
system of signs that may be understood to have meaning through
the convention of social acceptance. The sign (or signifier) is
not the meaning (the signified) but conveys meaning. The word
“cat” is formed by two consonants and a vowel. It has a sound
that has nothing to do with a furry domestic animal that purrs.
Yet, we agree that when we say “cat,” we intend to refer to the
category of animal.

12. What’s in a Name?

13. What’s in a Name?
Omar Khadr

14. What’s in a Name?

15. What’s in a Name?
terrorist

16. What’s in a Name?
Canadian citizen

17. • Hipster Beards

18. For example, an everyday example is a stop sign. In this
example, the physical sign is the signifier. The concept of
stopping is the signified.
=the sign or signifier
STOP!!! =the signified

19. What does this have to do with literature,
or real life?
• How many of you have been taught that to teach students
how to read literature is also to teaching them how to read
life?
• That reading Shakespeare or Wordsworth or Blake
prepares you for life, for “reading” other “texts” in the
world?

20. What does this have to do with literature, or real life?
• That reading Shakespeare or Wordsworth or Blake
prepares you for life, for “reading” other “texts” in the
world?
• MEANING IS THEREFORE FOUND IN THE PROMISE
OF STRUCTURES, IN PARTICIPATION AND
BELONGING.
• Advertising exploits this all the time. Empty language
offers you a world that is mythical, that cannot exist, yet
we believe that we can buy our way into that world.
• It is a mythical, abstract community based on privilege
and purchasing power.

24. Deconstruction
• Deconstruction is, at first, a difficult critical method to understand because it
asks us to set aside ways of thinking that are quite natural and comfortable.
• For example, we frequently see the world as a set of opposing categories:
male/female, rational/irrational, powerful/powerless.
• It also looks at the ways in which we assign value to one thing over another,
such as life over death, presence over absence, and writing over speech.
• Deconstruction asks us to question the very assumptions that we bring to that
analysis. Gender, for example, is a “construct,” a set of beliefs and
assumptions that we have built, or constructed, over time and experience. But
if we “de-construct” gender, looking at it while holding aside our internalized
beliefs and expectations, new understandings become possible.
• To practice this perspective, then, we must constantly ask ourselves why we
believe what we do about the makeup of our world and the ways in which we
have come to understand the world. Then we must try to explain that world in
the absence of our old beliefs.

25. • But if we “de-construct” gender, looking at it while holding
aside our internalized beliefs and expectations, new
understandings become possible.
• To practice this perspective, then, we must constantly ask
ourselves why we believe what we do about the makeup
of our world and the ways in which we have come to
understand the world. Then we must try to explain that
world in the absence of our former beliefs.

26. • A method of reading and theory of language that seeks to
subvert, dismantle, and destroy any notion that a text or
signifying system has any boundaries, margins,
coherence, unity, determinate meaning, truth, or identity.
• Unlike structuralism, which privileges structure over event,
deconstruction insists on the paradox of structure and
event. "Theory," Jonathan Culler writes, "must shift back
and forth between these perspectives," and this shifting
results in "an irresolvable alternation or aporia (puzzle)."

27. Deconstruction
• "As J. Hillis Miller puts it, "deconstruction is not a
dismantling of a text but a demonstration that it has
already dismantled itself."
• According to Jonathan Culler, "a deconstruction involves
the demonstration that a hierarchical opposition, in which
one term is said to be dependent upon another conceived
as prior, is in fact a rhetorical or metaphysical imposition
and that the hierarchy could well be reversed."

28. Deconstruction
• Deconstruction calls all of these assumptions into
question. It asks you to read resistantly—to not take a
work of literature at its face value and to question the
assumptions, both literary and philosophical, that the work
or the author asks you to make.
• It helps us to become careful and skeptical consumers of
culture, not passive recipients of “great works.”

29. Deconstruction
• By construct, we mean something that has been constructed by
mental synthesis. That is, constructs are created when we combine
things we know through our senses or from our experiences.
• They do not exist naturally; they are products of our manipulation of
how we see the world—how we read the signs.
• When we reexamine and challenge the constructs employed by the
literary writer, we “deconstruct.”
• The term does not simply mean to take it apart. It means we need to
look thoughtfully beyond the surface of the text—to peel away like an
onion the layers of constructed meanings.
• It doesn’t mean the same thing as analyzing. In the traditional sense,
when we analyze a piece, we put it back the way it was and
appreciate it more.
• When we deconstruct a piece of literature, we realize that there is
something incomplete or dishonest or unintended with how it was put
together in the first place.

30. Deconstruction
• When we reexamine and challenge the constructs employed by the
literary writer, we “deconstruct.”
• The term does not simply mean to take it apart. It means we need to
look thoughtfully beyond the surface of the text—to peel away like an
onion the layers of constructed meanings.
• It doesn’t mean the same thing as analyzing. In the traditional sense,
when we analyze a piece, we put it back the way it was and
appreciate it more.
• When we deconstruct a piece of literature, we realize that there is
something incomplete or dishonest or unintended with how it was put
together in the first place.

31. Deconstruction
• Having been written by a human being with unresolved
conflicts and contradictory emotions, a story may disguise
rather than reveal the underlying anxieties or perplexities
of the author. Below the surface, unresolved tensions or
contradictions may account for the true dynamics of the
story. The story may have one message for the ordinary
unsophisticated reader and another for the reader who
responds to its subtext, its subsurface ironies. Readers
who deconstruct a text will be “resistant” readers. They
will not be taken in by what a story says on the surface
but will try to penetrate the disguises of the text. . . They
may engage in radical rereading of familiar classics.
• H. Guth and G. Rico, Discovering Literature (Prentice
Hall, 1996):366.

32. Deconstruction
• Deconstruction is a strategy for revealing the underlayers
of meaning in a text that were suppressed or assumed in
order for it to take its actual form.
• Texts are never simply unitary but include resources that
run counter to their assertions and/or their authors’
intentions.
• In this sense, a deconstructionist often begins by looking
at pairings and examining what is necessary for that
pairing to maintain its “hold” or centre.

33. Deconstruction
• Deconstruction is a strategy for revealing the underlayers
of meaning in a text that were suppressed or assumed in
order for it to take its actual form.
• Texts are never simply unitary but include resources that
run counter to their assertions and/or their authors’
intentions.
• In this sense, a deconstructionist often begins by looking
at pairings and examining what is necessary for that
pairing to maintain its “hold” or centre.
• Let’s go back to Browning poem and Tara’s example

34. TRUE genius, but true woman ! dost deny
The woman's nature with a manly scorn
And break away the gauds and armlets worn
By weaker women in captivity?
Ah, vain denial ! that revolted cry
Is sobbed in by a woman's voice forlorn, _
Thy woman's hair, my sister, all unshorn
Floats back dishevelled strength in agony
Disproving thy man's name: and while before
The world thou burnest in a poet-fire,
We see thy woman-heart beat evermore
Through the large flame. Beat purer, heart, and higher,
Till God unsex thee on the heavenly shore
Where unincarnate spirits purely aspire !

35. Deconstruction
• In this sense, a deconstructionist often begins by looking
at pairings and examining what is necessary for that
pairing to maintain its “hold” or centre.
• Think of something you’ve read
• What are the pairs dependent upon?
• What happens when the pairs are deconstructed?
• Is there anything that is omitted that allows for the pairs to
stand in opposition?

36. Deconstruction
• "As J. Hillis Miller puts it, "deconstruction is not a
dismantling of a text but a demonstration that it has
already dismantled itself."
• According to Jonathan Culler, "a deconstruction involves
the demonstration that a hierarchical opposition, in which
one term is said to be dependent upon another conceived
as prior, is in fact a rhetorical or metaphysical imposition
and that the hierarchy could well be reversed."
• Are there examples where Shakespeare “deconstructs”
Macbeth’s world?

37. Transcendental Signified
• A term coined by Jacques Derrida
• In Saussure’s world of signs and signifiers, there is the
implication that there is a centre.
• The author is the centre of the text
• God is the centre of our lives
• Faith does not rely on anything to be a centre—it just is.
• It does not change from sign to signifier or back again.

38. Transcendental Signified
• A term coined by Jacques Derrida
• In Saussure’s world of signs and signifiers, there is the implication
that there is a centre.
• The author is the centre of the text
• God is the centre of our lives
• Faith does not rely on anything to be a centre—it just is
• It does not change from sign to signifier or back again
• Derrida calls centre the transcendental signified, and says there is no
such thing.
• No one will ever find the centre of everything, because the meaning is
constantly deferred.
• Many find this position intolerable because it means we live in a world
that lacks meaning.
• Do you think Deconstruction is oppositional to faith?

39. Faith and Theory
• We have a dilemma as Christian scholars of literature.
• On one hand, we can pursue Christian themes, imagery,
etc in literature without bothering what a poststructuralist
or a postcolonialist does with literature.

40. Faith and Theory
• We have a dilemma as Christian scholars of literature.
• On one hand, we can pursue Christian themes, imagery,
etc in literature without bothering what a poststructuralist
does with literature.
• On the other hand, do we not have a responsibility as
teachers and as scholars to engage with the theoretical
pursuits of our field?

41. Faith and Theory
• We have a dilemma as Christian scholars of literature,
and as teachers of faith.
• On one hand, we can pursue Christian themes, imagery,
etc in literature without bothering what a poststructuralist
does with literature.
• On the other hand, do we not have a responsibility as
teachers and as scholars to engage with the theoretical
pursuits of our field?
• We are going to tread carefully and mindfully from here on
in.
• Also, our faith is not ignored in Ecocriticism, but that is
another day.