IGNOU MEG-5 - Literary Criticism and Theory Block-7 Deconstruction Complete Notes from each unit with Important questions for exam
Block-7 Deconstruction Important questions:
1. Discuss the strengths and limitations of deconstruction as a method of critical inquiry. 2
2. Evaluate Derrida’s concept of Deconstruction and his resistance to it.
3. What is the process of 'deconstructing' a text ? Elaborate.
4. What is 'deconstruction' ? Is 'deconstruction' an effective tool for analysing a literary text ? Give a reasoned answer.
5. Discuss deconstruction as a method of critical reading of a text.
6. How does Derrida analyse the concept of the sign to show that there can be no determinacy in meaning?
7. Why does Derrida resist definitions ? Give reasons for your answer.
8. Attempt a critical evaluation of the theory of structuralism.
9. Examine the approaches of Structuralism and Deconstruction to the theory of sign-system.
10. Examine how Waiting for Godot problematizes the meaninglessness of life.
11. Analyse John Donne's The Canonization' with the tools of 'Deconstruction'. 2
12. Drama as a form lends itself well to the deconstruction approach. Discuss with reference to a drama text in your course
13. What does Roland Barthes mean by ‘the death of the author’ ? Do you agree with his views ? Provide reasons for your answer 4
14. What according to Barthes is the difference between 'work' and 'text' ? Explain 4
15. Literature inevitably brings to surface the oppressive nature of structures like religion, family and the state. How important is the writer’s ideology in this context ?
UNIT 1 ROOTS : NEW CRITICISM AND STRUCTURALISM
Deconstruction came after New Criticism and Structuralism. the basic parameters of the deconstructionist method-close focusing on a text and trying to analyze its structure seem to be prepared for in New Criticism and Structuralism.
NEW CRITICISM A BRIEF SURVEY 1920-50.
· New Critics believed literature to be a self-sustaining artifact and hence discussed it only through a "close reading" of texts. They worked without any assumptions about the author's intention, the work's relation to history, society, or the sciences; and did not value any subjective response. A text's meaning was to be found through careful attention to the complex verbal texture present on the page.
· A poem was said to possess an organic unity with form and content being inseparable. Further, New Criticism tried to displace content in literary analysis and treat the work's form as its content.
· The form of a poem was defined by the New Critics primarily in terms of its images.
· Paradox and Irony were thought to reflect the structures of the human imagination itself..
FROM NEW CRITICISM TO STRUCTURALISM
New Criticism declined in the 1950s. One of the chief causes for its decline was that it concentrated on the isolated literary text and left the broader, structural aspects of literature untouched. This conflicted with the spirit of the then current North American society, which was steadily growing more scientific and managerial in its mode of thought. What was needed was a mix of the formalist bent of New Criticism together with something much more broad-based, to make criticism a good deal more systematic and scientific. The answer arrived in 1957 in the form of Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism.
Frye felt that contemporary criticism had become a matter of subjective value judgments and needed the discipline of an objective system. He believed that literature itself was an objective system and worked through certain objective laws.
Roughly speaking Structuralism derives from two terms: structure and ism. The Oxford English Dictionary defines "structure" as " manner in which a complete whole is constructed, or a whole of the essential parts of something." Look at the pen you use. It is a structure made up of smaller units: the body, the refill, the spring, etc. So, when we speak of a structure we refer to a whole with certain essential constituents. "Ism" is a suffix, \khich suggests a system, or principle based on the word / concept to which it is appended.
Eg So, Marxism suggests a system or body of princip16s deriving primarily from the writings of Marx. Thus, Structuralism would refer to a system or body of principles deriving from the belief that any phenomenon is a structure, that is, a whole with certain essential constituents. It would attempt to investigate the nature of the structure and the general laws by which it works.
Saussure to Structuralism: Sign theory
Saussure’s Signifier & signified theory of CAT and what it means? CAT=/CAP two arbitrary links: between a signifier and the signified, and the sign and the referent. Eg. Welsh has glass color which can be closest to grey in English.
"Semiology:": a science that studies the life of signs [linguistic or otherwise] within society".
Barthes defined Structuralism as a mode of analysis of cultural artefacts, which originates in the method of contemporary linguistics. Different perspectives of interpreting & applying linguistic model:
Jakobson's Poetic Analyses discovery procedure : which characteristics of a verbal form are performing what function in a text. In the context of poetry, it means -identifying which features make the language poetic. the poetic use of language involves selecting and placing in a sequence items that are phonologically and grammatically related.
Greimas' Semantic Analysis - literary meaning cannot be explained by a method which works up from smaller units to larger ones. That is , literary meaning is not as simple an affair as general meaning would be. We may be able to specify a broad framework of meaning for a text.
Todorov's Grammar of Decameron reading each story as a sentence and defining its units as noun, adjective and verb is one way of discovering its structure just as reading each story as an argument may lead to identifying it as structured out of a subject, predicate, etc.
Culler's Structuralist Poetics believe that the linguistic method cannot serve as a discovery procedure. We cannot transport concepts or theories from linguistics and apply it to literature in the hope of discovering its meaning. Instead, linguistics should be used as a general model for semiological investigation. instead of copying linguists, literary critics should learn from them.
UNIT 2 BEGINNING DECONSTRUCTION
11.1 the late 1960s, another movement, deriving its name from Structuralism began to emerge poststructuralism. begins to emerge as a break away from conventional Structuralism. Indeed, the underlying theoretical matrix which supports Poststructuralism has so radically departed from the basic premises of Structuralism that it seems justified to refer to it as an independent movement.
Deconstruction has been variously presented as a philosophical position, a political or intellectual stance or just simply as a strategy of reading. Deconstruction points to a fallacy not in the way the first or second hierarchy is constructed but in the very process of creating hierarchies in human thought. Deconstruction does not lead us from a faulty to a correct way of thinking I or writing. Rather it shows us the limitations of human thought operating through I language even while harbouring the same limitations itself. Every deconstructive 1 I operation relies on the same principle it sets out to deconstruct and is thus open to I deconstruction itself2.2.2
Nietzsche's Deconstruction of Causality - Suppose one sits and feels a pain. This leads one to look for a cause and noticing a pin discovers the cause for the pain. In the process of explaining the pain one reverses the order in which perception took place instead of 'pain to pin" one thinks: pin to pain. "The fragment of the outside world of which we become conscious comes after the effect has been produced on us and is projected a posteriori as its cause. On the contrary, continues Nietzsche "the basic fact of experience is that the cause gets imagined [established?] after the effect has occurred". The principle of causality leads us to substitute the cause for the effect as the originating term.
1- the deconstruction itself relies on the notion of cause: the experience of pain causes us to discover the pin and thus causes the production of a cause. To deconstruct causality one must operate with the principle of causation itself. To repeat what has been said earlier4e deconstruction operates through the very . principle it deconstructs. It attacks a rational structure from the inside.
2- Deconstruction exchanges these properties and upsets the hierarchy. If the effect (i.e. pain) causes the cause (i.e. pin) to become a cause, then the effect and not the cause should be treated as the origin. We have already seen that the effect ( pain ) cannot be treated as the origin. If neither cause nor effect can unproblematically occupy the position of origin, then origin is no longer originally, it loses its privileged status.
UNIT 3 IMPLICATIONS
Roland Barthes is regarded as a pre-eminent structuralist in literary studies, the structuralist who developed a method for studying the structure of cultural signs and discourses
ESSAY 1: 'FROM WORK TO TEXT'
Difference between Work & text :
1- "The work is concrete, occupying a portion of book space [say on the book- shelf]; the text on the other hand is a methodological field . .. ."
2- The work can be seen in bookstores, in card catalogues and course lists, while the text reveals itself, articulates itself according to or against certain rules.
3- While the work is held in hand, the text is held in language it exists only as discourse. In other words, the text is experienced only in an activity of reading.
Methodology refers to "the process or way in which a particular mental activity proceeds" and "field" refers to the scene or space of an activity or influence. Therefore, a "methodological field " refers to a scene or space in which a particular mental activity proceeds, a space, which a particular form of mental activity creates. A certain degree of abstraction is involved here so try to grasp it carefully. When speaking of "text" we refer to a mental space in which proceeds a particular mental activity set in motion by the act of reading a work. It is in this sense that Barthes refers to the work as something concrete while presents the text as a process as something dynamic and transient.
1- The text is always paradoxical - a text always tends to go beyond what is the commonly accepted notion of a work/genre or type of writing.
2- The text practises the infinite deferral of the signified - Meaning can be fixed in two ways. On the one hand, one can attribute straight, literal meanings to words. The work would then pose a challenge only to the linguist who would study the production of this simple meaning. On the other hand, we can assume that its meaning is fixed but hidden; that is, there is in it something deeper than the straight and literal meaning. In this case it would interest a school of criticism like Marxism, Freudianism, etc.
3- The text is plural - in a text many meanings co-exist and each of these meanings is traversed by the others- constituting a part of it and constituted by it in turn-each carrying the traces of others and inextricably linked to them.
4- The text is read without the father's signature - The work is usually considered the product or child of forces outside it--that is, both its creation and meaning are seen as determined by outside forces. is read without the guiding intent of race, history, tradition or the author.
5- The text abolishes the distance between Writing and Reading - meaning and significance, which had conventionally been assumed to be tied to the author now come to be associated partly with the reader. It is not that the reader's involvement is intensified in the text. It is rather that the reader now has a more definite involvement. she refuses the fixed meaning handed down to him/her through tradition and instead, reads and writes simultaneously in the process of deciding a text's meaning.
6- The text is linked to pleasure - I can enjoy reading Shakespeare or Milton but this pleasure is the pleasure of appropriation 1 consumption. This pleasure, Barthes says, is one of separation. It is linked to the fact that I cannot write what I am reading. The text on the other hand, yields a different kind of pleasure. pleasure without separation. The play that characterizes a decentred text ensures that there is going to be no stability, which a reader can appropriate and be separated from. Instead, the reader is going to be continuously implicated in producing the meaning that the text approaches.
ESSAY 2 : THE DEATH OF THE AUTHOR
answering these four questions:
1- How did the author emerge?
2- What functions did the author perform?
3- Who killed the author?
4- Implications of the death.
Answers:
1- In the Renaissance, the Western world displaced "God" from the centre of the universe and put "Man" there. re Barthes sees the rise of capitalist- system cantered on a man and his wealth. In literature, this faith and confidence in the power of the individual to construct a stable world, a sphere of value and significance, found expression in the concept of an 'Author'.
2- an author was in place it exercised a certain influence, or "tyranny" as Barthes would say, on the interpretation of literary texts. Thus, the content of a work began to be understood and explained in terms of the author's life, tastes, passions and experiences. This tendency to look for causal factors in the life of the author tended to spill over from the biographical school to the Marxist or psychoanalytic schools.
3- the meaning of a sentence does not depend for its existence on a speaker's presence or intent. The signs/words themselves are enough to set a meaning into play. The authorial intent is not a necessary element in the understanding of a text. language instead of being created by man becomes the creator of man, at least in the sense we know ourselves. Being a "subject" man is also reduced to a field in which numerous forces are at play. The author had to disappear also because the writing individual speaks from a specially problematic site in the text-+ site where a writing subject, an independent subject or the person who happens to write, a fictional character through which the author speaks, the ideas of the age. universal wisdom etc.
4- Implication of death:
a. a)The most obvious implication of this death is the fact that the author 's life, experiences, passions, intent cease to be important determinants of the meaning of a text. The text is seen as embedded in language, w& performs according to its own rules. Therefore, Barthes writes that instead of the author we now have the "scripter" who merely writes, giving a material/tangible shape to the text without limiting or controlling its meaning ,in any significant way.
b. b) The next important implication of the death of the author is the fairly radical Implication questioning which it initiates about the mimetic function of literature. The "mimetic" view sees a work as "representing" or "mirroring" a particular reality through the agency of an author. So, it is commonplace to believe that E. M. Forster's A Passage to India represents an Englishman's perception of colonial India. But with the death of the author, a text can no longer simply designate or represent something which the author had in mind, something which was objectively present there and the author was describing. No matter how hard the author tries, the meaning of his/her written text will be determined/controlled by a set of forces the writing sets in play in the mind of the reader. This "set" and "play" are highly subjective and cannot be spoken about in any concrete terms as yet.
c. The claim that I can mean anything fixed, that I deal with stable meanings in communicating with someone else is effectively undercut. Indeed the picture that now emerges is that instead of man writing through language to express a fixed meaning, it is language that writes through us, creating meanings in our minds whose theoretical status is extremely dubious.
d. For example, when you encounter the term "love" in 16th century poetry two things happen in your interpretation of it: 1. the word is nebulously defined by its difference from other words in your vocabulary. 2. all previous usages of that word (literary, non-literary, audio, visual, metaphorical etc.) interact with the given context to give you an idea of what the word should mean here.
UNIT 4 DECONSTRUCTING POETRY
William Wordsworth's 'Afterthought' – Read from book
JOHN DONNE'S 'THE CANONIZATION
Summary
Hierarchies - the poem's world is divided into two: the private sphere of the lovers' experience and the public realm of the outer world.
poet in the first stanza while arguing for the perpetuation of the lover-centred world rejects the public sphere as of no consequence to him and his beloved.. In the second stanza, the private world of the lovers is shown to function independently, not deriving any sustenance from, or interrupting the public world in any way. The third stanza defines the unique and distinct elements, which sets the private world apart
. In the fourth stanza, the public and private come into direct confrontation but the poet, while not suggesting the power of the public world, arbitrarily devalues it by willingly accepting a private and smaller alternative. By the end of the fourth and the whole of the fifth stanza, he is more confident about the value of the private world and thinks that the public world will invoke this private world to gain some of the uniquely mysterious qualities associated with it.
A Deconstructive Analysis
Now let us see the potential latent in this poem to disrupt the hierarchy operating. YOU have probably felt that the superiority of the lovers' world is a self-professed presumption outer world does not say not even given a voice. On the contrary, the suggested voice of the outer world has a fairly disruptive potential, enough to trouble the poet to the point of exasperation at which the-poem opens. It carries the potential to chide/flout, acquire wealth, position etc., has the power to destroy the poet's reputation and probably shroud him in oblivion. In spite of all these powers ascribed to the public world, the poet feels that it will ultimately sing that prescribed hymn in their memory
The only claim made good by Donne in this poem about the superiority of the lover's word is a uniquely mysterious and spiritual experience of love which makes them saints, thus deserving the attention of the outer world. This, the deconstructionist is going to argue, is a philosophical fiction. What Donne experiences with his beloved as spiritual love, is in the last instance a state of harmony between two individuals in which the outer world and their corporeal selves contribute significantly. Despite claims to the contrary, this experience is subject to time. Donne's spiritual experience of love comes to acquire some of the permanence associated with Essence. But the deconstructionist will argue that Donne and his beloved continuously construct the significance of their relationship through and in experience. In other words, the significance of the relationship lies not in its mystic essence, but in the dynamic and lively experience that it leads to-perfectly within time and within the parameters of the day-to-day world.
The poem in a virtually self-contradicting spirit acknowledges the superiority of the public world in various oblique ways
. notice the disproportionately large amount of poetic space devoted to the supposedly inferior public world? The lovers' world is one of deprivation, while all the positives lie in the public world. This world has its corrosive and destructive powers, which is duly acknowledged by the poet, against which he appears helpless. Stanza 1 is significant in this respect. Not only is the poet hindered to the point of destruction by the powers of this world, but the last line seems to imply that this world has effective control over whether the poet will be allowed to love or not.
o, the lovers' private world is directed towards achieving fame in the public sphere - something, which they have already looked down upon as inferior. Then why try to achieve it? Finally, it appears, Donne is after all trying to "get a place but one lower in the hierarchy he has made. However, this craving for fame reverses that hierarchy for the reader. If spiritual love, is for the sake of gaining renown, then it no longer remains "peace" but is characterized by some of the "rage" associated with love in the public Renaissance world.
UNIT 5 DECONSTRUCTING DRAMA
Waiting for Godot .A Deconstructive Analysis
Samuel Beckettt (1906-90) wrote Waiting for Godot sometime between 1945 and 1950 soon after his return to Paris in 1945 at the end of World WarII. In Act 1 two tramps Vladimir and Estragon wait on a country road for an appointment with someone called Godot. Godot never comes but the tramps meet an aristocrat and his menial: Pozzo and Lucky and a messenger boy who informs them that Godot will not come 'today' but definitely 'tomorrow'. Act 2 repeats Act 1 with some important differences. But the basics remain the same-Vladimir and Estragon wait for Godot but meet Lucky and Pozzo and a messenger boy who carries the same message again.
Theatre of the Absurd
The Problem of Meaninglessness
Meaningless to Meaningful!
Deconstruction of the Play –
THE PROBLEM OF GODOT the character of Godot is a site where the hierarchy presence/absence is questioned and the superiority of either is left undecided. Godot is a dramatic reminder of the fact that presence is constituted by absence. s Godot present or absent? The text is non-committal. If you investigate it closely, it offers plenty of evidence that Godot is present and perhaps an equal amount that she (?) is absent
For example his presence, his reference to a concrete physical place where Godot lives, his message, and most important his expectation about a response from Vladimir and Estragon suggest that Godot is a real I present figure. However, when we consider his responses carefully we realize that they are evasive and uncertain nothing is committed through them. The reference to his brother which draws a parallel with Cain and Abel gives Godot a mythical ring and prompts us to equate him with the Old Testament God. At the end of having studied this summary of textual evidence, how far are we from deciding the question of Godot's presence I absence? Perhaps as far as we were in the beginning. This play is notorious for taking with the left hand what it gives with its right. Therefore, no certainties can be arrived at about Godot in this play.
THE PROBLEM OF TIME - Act One takes place one evening between twilight and moonshine--so does Act Two. That is all one gets out of the play in terms of its time scheme. How much time has lapsed between Act One and Two? One day as the stage direction would have you believe. Other things suggest the contrary. The bare tree now has three or four leaves. Pozzo has gone dumb and Lucky has gone blind, apart from growing much older. Definitely more than a day has passed. How long have Vladimir and Estragon been together ? The play is again notoriously evasive in its response . At the beginning of the play, Vladimir, consoling himself about the terrible nature of his existence explains
THE PROBLEM OF CONSCIOUSNESS - Vladimir (a) cannot verify whether he was asleep or awake in the past. (b) cannot verify whether he is asleep or awake then. (c) cannot find sufficient guarantee that one is awake when one thinks so. (d) is not convinced that consciousness and memory are sufficient guarantee of one's being awake. Deconstructing Drama (e) is unable to convince himself that he is awake. Systematically, Vladimir undercuts all the certainties associated with consciousness to finally reveal that consciousness by itself is unverifiable. We cannot be sure that the conscious exists. In that case the state of human mind would be a generalized state of unconsciousness which may lapse into a consciousness whose actual status is extremely dubious.
Freud’s 3 points: (a) The unconscious as the origin of all and the conscious as the destination of some ideas. I (b) The unconscious occupying a much larger portion of the human mind than the conscious. (c) The unconscious as a constituting force over the conscious as well as itself.
UNIT 6 RE-ASSESSING DECONSTRUCTION
the late Modem period in Western Europe, you will find that expression and its primary tool, language are at a crisis. Broadly speaking, the crisis had three significant dimensions :
(a) The communicative function of language had come under question. It was no longer possible to share the rationalist or empiricist trust of the great 19th century middle-class that language did hook itself on to the world .
(b) The emerging industrial society had reduced most utterances in language to mere instruments of science, commerce, advertising and the bureaucracy.
(c) An author could no longer presume that she shared with herhis audience a framework of collective beliefs which a writing could evoke, question and /or advance. In fact, such a framework had already been lost and it was being questioned if in the ideological turmoil of the twentieth century, such a shared framework could possibly be re-invented?
Deconstruction as a theoretical movement falls under the broad category poststructuralism. The Formalist and Structuralist preoccupation with language can be understood as an effort to restore to an alienated language the richness it had been robbed of.
SOME IMPORTANT PROBLEMS of Deconstruction:
The Problem of Responsibility - that it gives its practitioners a fairly wide scope to operate but does not fix any real responsibilities on them. One of the ideas central to deconstruction is that there can be no truth claims in linguistic utterances because language is a specially problematic medium
The Problem of Practical Experience - it goes so much against our day-to-day experience. meaning is uncertain and unstable, "Half there-half not there". In that case how do we interpret and understand the world and communicate it to others?
Eg the deconstructionist does not allow for any distinction on lines of purpose or norms that may be operative while interpreting the text, say whether the text is to be taken literally or metaphorically. So, when Lear in Shakespeare's play King Lear says "Pray you undo this button"; as an individual's statement it can be seen as conveying a straight wish for undoing the button's hold, in the sense that instead of Lear, if it were a friend speaking to us, we would have advanced, accepted his/her communicative intent and unbuttoned the dress. Language here serves a simple practical purpose. However this is not to say that the statement means only that. The same statement can be read in several other, perhaps metaphorical ways. We can read in it a desire for release, a wish for assistance in seeking the release, etc. The point to be noted is that Lear's immediate wish for unbuttoning is conveyed effectively, no matter what else we make out of that statement. That is when read in a simple straight communicative context, the statement does function and reveals a functional meaning , while in the metaphorical 1 mode it can signify a number of other things.
The Problem of 'Telos' - "telos" or '*goal or end which it does not seem to address practically. If all interpretation is misinterpretation and if all criticism of texts can engage only with a critic's own misconstruction, why bother to carry on the activities of criticism and interpretation?
The Charge of Hypocrisy - . If deconstruction questions the importance of language as a vehicle of communication then why does the deconstructionist write? If one of the things that deconstruction would have us believe is that the communicative powers of language are suspect, then why use language to communicate that across to us? Without the faith that writing conveys, even if approximately, the writer's intent, the project of writing becomes what could be called a graphic babbling exercise. So, if the deconstructionist is not babbling, she is indulging in hypocrisy. On the one hand, s/he would have us believe that language fails in communication, on the other, she uses language to express that failure of language to us.
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