Printable View
Hello, I'm new in here and I need a lilttle bit help about Deconstruction for my literary analysis. I'm kinda lost in here. I've been searching around and I'm still confused about it. Would you guys please give me help?
Can someone explain to me what is deconstruction means in brief way? and please give me some idea what kind of literary works that I can use for the analysis using deconstruction theory.
Thanks before :smile5:
Well, if no one else is going to take a stab at it, I might as well give it a shot.
Deconstruction is a relatively new movement with authors like Samuel Beckett (Waiting for Godot) and especially Eugene Ionesco's The Bald Soprano would be an excellent example, considering what I looked up online to refresh me as to a definition for deconstructionism. The breakdown of language is apparent in that play. Chaos and isolation (especially in understanding and meaning, even when others are present) is about the easiest I could break it down. I hope that helps and you still need the help. Post again if you're still not sure, but that should be about the gist of it.
Decostruction was introduced by Jacques Derrida in Of Grammatology, but it has been widely interpretated to mean rather different things. The original concept was of stripping a piece of literature apart to see how it was put together, but it has other meanings. You probably should find a definition or explanation of it that you like and work from that.
At its core, Deconstruction is about exposing the contradictions and oppositions in a work of literature, usually by close analysis of its language, to show that no single, coherent, absolute meaning can be obtained. So, eg, Deconstruction might analyze the themes of fate VS free-will in Macbeth and show that the play presents evidence for both aspects. It helps to understand that, before deconstruction, literary criticism was concerned with discovering THE meaning in any given text, but Deconstruction was really the first movement that held the belief that there WAS no singular "meaning" to any text, that in any text there were irresolved and irresolvable contradictions that could blow apart any systematic analysis that excluded such oppositions.
Personally, I find Deconstruction interesting, but like most theories it can be pushed too far and to ridiculous extremes. Not every text is contradictory, especially when it comes to authors that had a very clear idea of what they wanted to express. On the other hand, there are authors that sought to express the drama found in opposing ideals clashing and weren't concerned with deciding themselves which view was right. Shakespeare is one author. To use a modern example, James Merrill is another. In fact, the best study I've read on Merrill is Yenser's Deconstructionist work The Consuming Myth. You might check it out as a good example of Deconstructionist criticism.
It's about a shift from traditional philological service and the study of historical context, to the ideological frame of reference of the reader. The text is seen as creating their own literary reality, and as referring to other texts.
See also: Poststructuralism, cultural studies (analysis) and hermeneutics