Deconstruction literary theory, "deconstruction" meaning to break down texts in this context, considers the "whole" and the "holes" of the text. In other words, what is said and what is left unsaid. For example, during construction, when builders are initially raising a building from the ground, they scaffold a temporary structure that shows the general shape of the building. This scaffolding usually looks like a crisscross of metal or wooden support beams, with lots of holes in between. The "whole" of the structure, in literature, has no meaning without the "holes", which are each reader's individual interpretations of the text. The "whole" is the text itself, the "holes" are the readers' attempts to extrapolate meaning. Without the reader, the text is incomplete, and because every reader will have a slightly different interpretation, no literary text will ever mean exactly the same thing to different people. Some examples of deconstruction in literature will be explored in the next section.
Examples Of Deconstructive Criticism In Literary
Derridean deconstruction is sometimes described as bringing a literary approach to philosophy, a way of reading philosophical texts like literature, using methods of literary analysis. Irrespective of how accurate this view of deconstruction is, Derrida is now a prominent figure in literary analysis and criticism itself.
Feminism adopted deconstruction to dismantle the cultural assumptions surrounding gender. Feminist writers used it to challenge the dominance and presumed superiority of the masculine. The binary opposition 'man/woman' is now commonly referred to as the gender binary and has been challenged by scholars of gender studies. Feminist literary criticism often uses the deconstructionist approach to analyse literary texts.
The theory of deconstruction is important because it heavily influenced postmodern philosophy, intellectual thought, and literary criticism. It remains one of the most widely discussed theory in postmodernity.
Derrida's motivation for developing deconstructive criticism, suggesting the fluidity of language over static forms, was largely inspired by Friedrich Nietzsche's philosophy, beginning with his interpretation of Orpheus. In Daybreak, Nietzsche announces that "All things that live long are gradually so saturated with reason that their origin in unreason thereby becomes improbable. Does not almost every precise history of an origination impress our feelings as paradoxical and wantonly offensive? Does the good historian not, at bottom, constantly contradict?".[21]
A survey of the secondary literature reveals a wide range of heterogeneous arguments. Particularly problematic are the attempts to give neat introductions to deconstruction by people trained in literary criticism who sometimes have little or no expertise in the relevant areas of philosophy in which Derrida is working. These secondary works (e.g. Deconstruction for Beginners[39][page needed] and Deconstructions: A User's Guide)[40][page needed] have attempted to explain deconstruction while being academically criticized for being too far removed from the original texts and Derrida's actual position.[citation needed]
Between the late 1960s and the early 1980s, many thinkers were influenced by deconstruction, including Paul de Man, Geoffrey Hartman, and J. Hillis Miller. This group came to be known as the Yale school and was especially influential in literary criticism. Derrida and Hillis Miller were subsequently affiliated with the University of California, Irvine.[51]
As we learned in class today, deconstructive literary theory basically takes anything from a novel to a greeting card and makes it an existential crisis in training. We are the sum of the language and ideology we are raised with, therefore we have no say in our essential self. If you apply deconstructive criticism to our lives, we have no soul because language is too unreliable a source to explain what it is about us that constitutes a soul.
Kibin. (2023). Deconstructive criticism of the short story the edge of happiness by joao guimaraes rosa. -examples/deconstructive-criticism-of-the-short-story-the-edge-of-happiness-by-joao-guimaraes-rosa-Cir9kGK3
"Deconstructive Criticism of the Short Story The Edge of Happiness by Joao Guimaraes Rosa." Kibin, 2023, www.kibin.com/essay-examples/deconstructive-criticism-of-the-short-story-the-edge-of-happiness-by-joao-guimaraes-rosa-Cir9kGK3
1. "Deconstructive Criticism of the Short Story The Edge of Happiness by Joao Guimaraes Rosa." Kibin, 2023. -examples/deconstructive-criticism-of-the-short-story-the-edge-of-happiness-by-joao-guimaraes-rosa-Cir9kGK3.
"Deconstructive Criticism of the Short Story The Edge of Happiness by Joao Guimaraes Rosa." Kibin, 2023. -examples/deconstructive-criticism-of-the-short-story-the-edge-of-happiness-by-joao-guimaraes-rosa-Cir9kGK3.
This article focuses on literary interpretation, which may be called second-level literary criticism. The difference between first- and second-level criticism is similar to the distinction between a like or dislike of a text versus giving an interpretation of it. Imagine that a group of friends gathers outside a movie theater after watching a re-release of Twilight, the first film in the Twilight film series, based on the novel of the same name by Stephanie Meyers. Some of the people in the group say they do not like the film because it portrays Bella as a weak female who becomes obsessed with Edward Cullen whom she cannot marry without leaving her loving father and losing her precious mortality. Other people like those aspects of the film, however, arguing that the film makes them disagree with its representation of some women as meek characters. In each case, everyone states his or interpretation of the film to contribute to a conversation about it; everyone offers literary criticism.
Literary criticism advances a particular argument about a specific text or a set of texts, so literary criticism should be persuasive. The first step in formulating a critical argument is to assume a rhetorical stance that engages a type, school, or approach of literary criticism. The critical approach will determine the content of the interpretation. Although literary theory and criticism have existed from classical through contemporary times, a feature of modern and postmodern literary criticism is the division of criticism into various schools. In this article, students will learn about the modern and contemporary critical movements that scholars and students most frequently use, gaining the ability to handle any literary analysis assignment.
Structuralism first developed in Anthropology (Claude Lévi-Strauss), in literary and cultural studies (Roman Jakobson, Roland Barthes, and Gérard Genette), psychoanalysis, and intellectual history (Culler 17). Structuralism enjoyed popularity in the 1950s and 1960s in both European and American literary theory and criticism.
Jacques Derrida is the originator of deconstruction. As M.H. Abrams points out in A Glossary of Literary Terms, however, Derrida did not intend for deconstruction to serve as a method for writing literary criticism. Rather, Derrida viewed deconstruction as a technique for exposing and subverting many assumptions of Western thought in a variety of texts (59). Additionally, Paul de Man, Barbara Johnson, and J.H. Miller have all been instrumental in the development of deconstructive readings of literary texts.
Although Derrida is a philosopher, his work has been applied mainly to problems of literary criticism; as a result much of the literature on deconstruction is written by literary critics and scholars.(5) Adapting the work of Derrida and other literary critics to the problems of legal and political thought is not, however, as difficult as might first appear. Derrida is above all interested in the connection (and misconnection) between what we want to say and the signs we use to express our meaning. In short, he is interested in the interpretation of texts, and that is hardly strange territory for lawyers, who spend most of their time trying to understand what other lawyers have said in legal texts. On the other hand, explaining deconstructive practice is no small undertaking. Like many French intellectuals of his day, Derrida was schooled in the continental tradition of philosophy, whose major influences are Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger. None of these philosophers is known for clarity of exposition, and Derrida often does little better than his intellectual predecessors.(6) For this reason, I will attempt to translate his ideas into a form that can be more easily understood by those familiar with the Anglo-American schools of philosophy.
No doubt all of these theories are, in their various ways, mistaken, defective, and provisional, but for clarity, rigor, precision, theoretical comprehensiveness, and above all, intellectual content, they are written at a level that is vastly superior to that at which deconstructive philosophy is written. How then are we to account for the popularity and influence of deconstructionism among literary theorists? Why indeed do its very intellectual weaknesses seem to be a source of popularity? To understand the phenomenon fully, one would have to know much more than I do about the culture of English departments and other modern language departments in American universities. But I have observed that there are certain features of the deconstructionist ideology that fit in very well with the presuppositions behind much current literary theorizing.
Recall that Culler was presenting the example from Nietzsche of the "deconstruction of causality" as a paradigm example of deconstruction. The outcome of the investigation, however, is that causality, the concept of causality, was not in the least involved here. That is, there was no deconstructive criticism of a concept at all. Rather one philosophical account of how a certain concept is acquired was rejected in favor of another one - and the new one shares with the old one empiricist assumptions about concept formation (and shows no awareness of Kant and Kantian views at all.) That is striking, for deconstruction seems to promise more, namely a criticism of concepts that we human beings have rather than just a rejection of what some philosophers have had to say about those concepts. 2ff7e9595c
コメント