1. Deconstructionism

2. Jacques Derrida – argued that in Western Culture people tend to think in binary oppositions

3. Look at these
White/black
Masculine/feminine
Beginning/end
Presence/absence
Nonconformity/conformity
Love/hate

5. Deconstructionists look first at language – they say it is much more slippery and ambiguous than we realize

6. Deconstruction asks you to look at the ambiguities several sentences can have

7. Emphasis and context
Time flies like an arrow

8. Language is what forms us

9. Language is constantly overflowing with implications, associations, and contradictions that reflect the implications, associations, and contradictions of the ideologies of which it is formed.

10. Language is our ground of being or the foundations from which our experience and knowledge of the world is generated

11. Each of us is a kaleidoscope of selves

12. Deconstruction –
1 – language is dynamic, ambiguous, and unstable continually disseminating possible meanings

13. 2 – existence has no center, no stable meaning, no fixed ground

14. 3 – human beings are fragmented battlefields for competing ideologies whose only identities are the ones we invent and choose to believe

15. Literature is also dynamic, unstable, and ambiguous

16. Meaning is created by the reader in the act of reading

17. We create the meaning and value we find in the text

18. Two reasons in deconstructing literary texts
1 – to reveal its undecidability

20. To reveal a text’s undecidability is to show that the meaning of the text is really an indefinite, undecidable, plural, conflicting array of possible meanings and that the text has no meaning in the traditional sense.

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