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Our Western philosophy adopted the name: logocentric

Logocentric: A method of literary analysis in which words and language are regarded as a fundamental expression of external reality

There are risks and necessities of Deconstructive criticism

Any Questions?

Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

  • The novel is commonly thought as an anti-slavery novel, but the ending chapters contradict that theme
  • Binary Opposition between slavery and anti-slavery
  • The hierarchy is challenged when
  • Ms. Watson only sets Jim free after her death
  • Tom hides the fact that he knows Jim is supposed to be set free
  • Tom treats him badly for the two months that he is keeping the secret

The Road Not Taken, By Robert Frost

The Tain of the Mirror:

Derrida and the Philosophy of Reflection

by Rodolphe Gasché

  • Gasché offers a different method of deconstructing
  • He suggests that deconstruction is a "double gesture"
  • The "double gesture" is broken up into two phases

Phase of Reversal- identify the binary opposition, identify the hierarchy and then show how the text reverses the hierarchy

Phase of Reinscription- Readers show how the text carries a new meaning by its displacement of the hierarchy

Taking On The Tradition

by Michael Naas

  • Gives a very specific method to use while deconstructing a text

  • Deconstruct it through TWO readings
  • The First Reading- read the text the way it was intended to be read
  • Most traditional way of reading
  • Gives you a platform to base further discoveries off of
  • Ask yourself what the author means/meant
  • Consider all social, political, cultural aspects from when the text was written
  • The Second Reading- where the deconstructing comes into play
  • Read against the grain
  • Look for the things that aren't made explicitly clear
  • Find the binary oppositions
  • Identify the force of ambivalence that weakens the opposition

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair;

And having perhaps the better claim

Because it was grassy and wanted wear,

Though as for the passing there

Had worn them really about the same

And both that morning equally lay

In leaves no step had trodden black

Oh, I marked the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads on to way

I doubted if I should ever come back

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

There is a binary opposition between conformity and non-conformity

  • Privileged term is non-conformity
  • Path less traveled = non-conformity
  • "that has made all the difference"
  • The hierarchy is challenged throughout the poem
  • The two paths are repeatedly presented as equals
  • "Then took the other, as just as fair"
  • "Had worn them really about the same"
  • "Both that morning equally lay"

How Do You

Deconstruct Literature?

1. Identify the binary oppositions in the text

2. Identify the privileged of the pair

  • Which one is considered the "better one?"
  • Good vs. Evil
  • Past vs. Present
  • Innocence vs. Decadence
  • Nature vs. Civilization

3. Identify ways the privileged term is conflicted by the other term

  • Example- Innocence vs Decadence in the Great Gatsby
  • Reveals that neither side is actually privileged

Why Deconstruct Literature?

  • To reveal the complex operations of ideologies within the text (Tyson 259)

  • In contrast to New Criticism where readers work to find unity through conflicts, Deconstruction examines how conflicts weaken the ideology

Why Deconstruct Literature?

  • To discover the text's undecidability
  • Show that it's meaning is always changing

1. Identify the various interpretations

2. How do these interpretations contradict each other?

3. Conflicts = more interpretations = even more conflicts

  • Undecidability isn't a bad thing... it shows how dynamic language is
  • Language is always changing, therefore, "specific meanings are just moments of meaning" (Tyson 265)

Deconstructing Literature

  • Similar to language and the world in general.... Literature can be extremely ambiguous
  • There is no concrete meaning waiting to be uncovered

  • Meaning is created through the language
  • Always changing
  • Complicated and can be conflicting/overlapping
  • Influenced by culture, time period, location, etc
  • The word "gay" has carried many different meanings

  • The most "commonsense" interpretation is entirely based off of ideology

Deconstructing Language

Most of us take language for granted.

We blame ourselves when there's an error in communication when it could be the language that we're using.

Deconstruction's theory of language: more ambiguous than we realize.

Example of Deconstructionism

with Language

Deridda Says...

Language Before Derrida

Time flies like an arrow.

Time (verb) flies (obj.) like an arrow (adv. clause)

Time flies (noun) like (verb) an arrow (obj)

Without changing a word, this one sentence can have many meanings.

"Language is not the reliable tool of communication we believe it to be, but rather, a fluid, ambiguous domain of complex experience in which ideologies program us without being aware of them"

Language is the "ground of being"

Ground of Being: The foundation from which our experiences and knowledge of the world are generated (dictionary.com)

Thus

People who speak different languages think differently

Introduction to Deconstructionism

However, it's beneficial for us because..

Someone who is bilingual even thinks differently based on which language they are speaking at a particular moment.

Deconstructing Language:

Emphasizing Words

We can think critically

Shows us that our experience is shaped by ideaologies.

Introduced by Jacques Deridda in the 1960's

but mainly used in the 1970's.

Described as: "superficial analysis of wordplay that destroys our appreciation of literature and our ability to interpret it."

This is why people are hesitant about deconstructionism.

SYDNEY says I do not have to go to the mall

Sydney SAYS I do not have to go to the mall

Sydney says I do not have to go to the mall

Sydney says I do NOT have to go to the mall

Sydney says I do not HAVE to go to the mall Sydney says I do not have to GO to the mall

Sydney says I do not have to go to the MALL

Example: Asian Immigrant

Signs

A word is a sign.

Combining the symbols b-e-a-r spells out the word "bear"

This could mean more than one thing.

Recall the Radio Lab from the beginning of the semester. What are some examples of how language shapes the way we think?

Deconstructive Criticism

by

Emma Brooke

Lindsay Goldstein

Sydney Rossi

Not all sentences are clear

How These Ideas Shaped Western Philosophy

Imagine a night's sky with a moon in the middle. When describing the sky to a friend, you say

All systems of Western philosophy were based on a common "ground of being", but there were really three main "grounds of being"

The moon is big.

A sentence is not as clear as we think it is.

1. Based on form, organization and harmony

2. Based on personal reflections and rational ideas

3. Based on our consciousness

Textual Support

An Introductory Guide to Post-Structuralism and Postmodernism

by Madan Sarup

These "grounds of being" triggered our understanding of the world and ourselves......or so we thought:

Deconstructive Criticism

by Vincent B. Leitch

You cannot make assumptions about what a text is implying

People constantly change

The world constantly changes

Deconstruction: A chain of Signifiers

Derrida says, "first, that no particular sign can be regarded as referring to any particular signified and, second, that we are unable to escape the system of signifiers"

BUT

Unlike structuralism, deconstructionism does not consist of a union of "signifiers" and "signified", rather a "chain of signifiers"

Language stays the same

Risks: Changing the "ground of being"

When you change the meaning, you must apply it to the original meaning

Necessities: Changing the "ground of being"

Derrida says, "A new writing must weave and intertwine the two motifs. That is, several languages must be spoken and several texts produced at the same time"

Deconstruction claims that language is "non referential"

Language is a "fleeting and continual change of signifiers"

Aftershocks

We are not in the same place after all.

The only evidence of the disaster,

Mapping out across the bedroom wall,

Tiny cracks still fissuring the plaster –

A new cartography for us to master,In whose legend we read where we are bound:

Terra infirma, a stranger land, and vaster.

Or have we always stood on shaky ground?

The moment keeps on happening: a sound.

The floor beneath us swings, a pendulum

That clocks the heart, the heart so tightly wound,

We fall mute, as when two lovers come

To the brink of the apology, and halt,

Each standing on the wrong side of the fault.

A. E. Stallings

"Brown Eyed Girl" Van Morrison

Deconstruction and Human Identity

Language is ambiguous and constantly changing

Therefore

However, Derrida determined:

Differences in the word change

the meaning of the word

Humans are ambiguous and constantly changing

and

Language is still a "ground of being", but it DOES change constantly as the world changes

No one has a single identity, because the meaning of "identity" implies that humans are singular

“what we take to be meaning is really only the mental trace left behind by the play of signifiers, and that trace consists of the differences by which we define a word”

Deconstruction: A Post-Structuralist Theory

Discourse: The idea that each of the vantage points in which an idea can be viewed as has a language of its own

Red in comparison to blue and green

Deconstruction emerged after structuralism and rejected the central view of language which western philosophers called LOGOCENTRISM

Derrida vs. Copernicus:

Derrida decentered Western philosophy

Copernicus decentered the earth

Language has two

important characteristics

Crank: Ellen Hopkins

1. it’s play of signifiers continually defers, or postpones meanings

2. the meaning it seems to have is the result of the differences by which we distinguish one signifier from another.

Mirrors: Sylvia Plath

How we see the world,

Our world,

Is governed by language.

I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.

What ever you see I swallow immediately

Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.

I am not cruel, only truthful---The eye of a little god, four-cornered.

Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.

It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long

I think it is a part of my heart. But it flickers.

Faces and darkness separate us over and over.

Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me,

Searching my reaches for what she really is.

Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon.

I see her back, and reflect it faithfully.

She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands.

I am important to her. She comes and goes.

Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.

In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman

Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish

We are taught words mean certain things.

Language is idealogical.

Birth control in a technologically underdeveloped country

You know how you

stand and stand and stand

in line for the most

gigantic incredible roller

coaster

you've ever dared attempt

anticipation swelling,

minute by minute by minute

you choose to wait even

long to ride in the front

car

They buckle you in, lock the

safety bar with a jolting clunk!

Hook engaged, the chain jerks

you forward

You start to

climb

crank-crank-crank

Cresting on the top, time

moves into overtime

as you wait for that scant

hesitation, just before you

drop

yo know how you feel

at that instant? well, thats

exactly how it feels when you

shake hands with the

monster

Textual Support

Christopher Norris: Deconstruction, Theory, and Practice

Paul de Man states; “Literature as well as criticism is condemned (or privileged) to be forever the most rigorous and consequently, the most unrealiable language in terms of which man names and transforms himself”

“Deconstruction is the active antithesis of everything that criticism ought to be if one accepts its traditional values and concepts”

Challenges the idea of criticism

The moon is big.

Textual Support

Roland Bathes: S/Z

Interpretation of a text is to appreciate what constitutes it.

A text is a galaxy of signifiers.

-Has no beginning

-Reversible

-"Indeterminable"

-Can read it from "many entrances" and nothing will be considered the "beginning"

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