Literary Theory

Series I: Handout #9

 

 

Caricaturing Post-structuralism/Deconstruction: [sub]verse[ive] punct(U)ation; radical posturing; unintelligibility; obscure allusions; undefined jargon, often in French; insider/outsider politics; linguistic playfulness; mockery of under-theorized mainstream cultural values. 

 

Post-structuralism: Language doesn’t just reflect or record the world; it shapes it so that “how we see it what we see.”  We have no access to “True” knowledge, only language, which is only an interpretation that is constantly slipping.  Post-structuralism is an assault on the artificiality of common sense and the power-serving fictitiousness of science.  If science and common sense are invalid, then interpretive styles (and tones) derived from them are suspect.  There is no such thing as “Reason” or the “Self”—or any other pieties of the liberal tradition in Western Civilization; all values are deconstructed by showing how they were constructed by discourse at the service, typically, of oppression.  A typical move is to show the how values are constructed in such a way as to create a cultural center from which others can be marginalized.  All values are relativistic; the belief in the objective relationship between signifier and signified is derided as logocentrism.   

 

Leading Critics: Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida.  More on them later.

 

  Dude, it’s called “Theory Hair.”

 

A Good Paragraph from Barry:

 

“So the deconstructionist practices what has been called textual harassment or oppositional reading, reading with the aim of unmasking internal contradictions or inconsistencies in the text, aiming to show the disunity which underlies its apparent unity.  The aim of the New Critics of the previous generation, by contrast, had been precisely the opposite of this, to show the unity beneath apparent disunity.  In pursuance of its aims, the deconstructive process will often fix on a detail of the text which looks incidental . . . and then use it as the key to the whole text, so that everything is read through it . . . [Structuralists] show a unity of purpose within the text, as if the text knows what it wants to do and has directed all its means towards this end.  By contrast, the deconstructionist aims to show that the text is at war with itself: it is a house divided, and disunified.”

 

 

STRUCTURALISM                                                              DECONSTRUCTION

Show Unity                                                                              Show Disunity

Parallels/Echoes                                                                        Contradictions/Paradoxes

Balances                                                                                   Shifts/Breaks in Tone,                                                                                                               Viewpoint,

                                                                                                            Tense, Time, Person,

                                                                                                            Attitude.

Reflections/Repetitions                                                  Conflicts

Symmetry                                                                                 Absences/Omissions

Contrasts                                                                                  Linguistic Quirks

Patterns                                                                                    Aporia (self-contradiction)

 

                                                                                   

WHAT DECONSTRUCTIONISTS DO:

1. Expose textual unconscious, contradictory meaning beneath the surface of a text.

2. Focus on surface meaning of words and their associations, making the central to interpretation of the text.

3. Show that text is characterized by unstable disunity.

4. Analysis short passages with great intensity until multiple meanings emerge.

5. Seek the discontinuities in texts. 

 

 

THE DECONSTRUCTIVE THREE-STEP:

1. Verbal: paradoxes and contradictions on the level of language and discontinuities between language and ordinary reality described through oppositons.

2. Textual: looks for breaks in continuity on the overall level of the work, showing the lack of a unified position.  Also, what is omitted, left unsaid?

3. Linguistic: looks for moments when the work suggests the inadequacy of language. 

 

 

NOW LET’S TRY IT J!

 

 

 

Call me Ishmael. Some years ago - never mind how long precisely - having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen, and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off - then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship. There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me.

 

 

 

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Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of it as a final resting place for those who died here that the nation might live. This we may, in all propriety do. But in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead who struggled here have hallowed it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.

It is rather for us the living, we here be dedicated to the great task remaining before us--that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they here gave the last full measure of devotion--that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth."

 

 

 

 

 

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame

With conquering limbs astride from land to land;

Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand

A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
 
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
 
Mother of Exiles.  From her beacon-hand
 
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command 
 
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame,
 
"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
 
With silent lips.  "Give me your tired, your poor,
 
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
 
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore,
 
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
 
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"