Introduction to Postmodern Literary Theory Agenda Why study literary theory?

Jaques Derrida (1930-)

• THE SELF AS FICTION

• “Our self-presence is a fiction, we are in a constant state of differing and deferrence. As our center is not really a center, our self-presence is a fiction we create to disguise the play of opposition and displacement within which we live.”

Jaques Derrida (1930-)

• BASIS OF DECONSTRUCTION:

• Focuses on difference (from essay “differance”)
• All signs have difference
• Open up a space from that which they represent
• They defer—open up a temporal chain, or participate in temporality; meaning always delayed
• Every sign repeats the creation of time and space
• Difference is ultimate phenomenon in universe—which enables and results from being

• Difference is at the heart of existence, not essence

Jaques Derrida (1930-)

• LANGUAGE & MEANING:

• A meaning is always temporal and part of a network of meanings, part of a chain of meanings in a chain or system to which it belongs which is always changing

• What a sign differs from becomes an absent part of its presence (TRACE).

• Opposites already united. They depend upon each other for meaning. They are the alternating imprint of one another.

Jaques Derrida (1930-)

• INTERTEXTUALITY:

• All texts refer to other texts (just as signs refer to other signs).

• No interpretations are final.

• The authority of any text is provisional.

Jaques Derrida (1930-)

• STRUCTURALISM

• Signified

• Signifier

Jaques Derrida (1930-)

• Man can find truth in nature.

Jaques Derrida (1930-)

• FREEDOM FROM TYRANNY

• Meaning circulates by difference, by being other.

• It is creative and inventive.

• Affirms multiplicity, paradoxes, richness of our life .

• Frees ourselves from tyrannies of univocal readings.

• Opposes humanism, which puts man at the center. One can talk about ideas and work with views that man is at the center only by placing them “under erasure.”

• Closer to reality, less artificial

Jaques Derrida (1930-)

• "If anything is destroyed in a deconstructive reading, it is not the text, but the claim to unequivocal domination of one mode of signifying over another. A deconstructive reading is a reading which analyses the specificity of a text's critical difference from itself."

Jaques Derrida (1930-)

• DECONSTRUCTIVE INTERPRETATION:

• Find binary opposition and implied center

• Refute claims

• Find contradictions, self-imposed logic that is faulty

• Focus on what text is saying is other than what it appears to be saying

• Look for gaps, margins, figures, echoes, digressions, discontinuities

Jaques Derrida (1930-)

• Exclusions and repressions as important as what is said—in fact are more central: they point to the contingency of a central part

• What is not said provides clues to author’s real views of power

• Male Western authorities have encoded within their work silence about women and others (rationalized exploitation of others without knowing it).

Jaques Derrida (1930-)

• BINARY OPPOSITIONS

• Nature / culture
• Health / disease
• Purity / contamination
• Simplicity / complexity
• Good / evil
• Speech / writing

Jaques Derrida (1930-)

• Some literature that recognizes the highly mediated nature of our experience, and are playful, ironic, explicitly intertextual and deconstruct themselves may be closer to reality.

Jaques Derrida (1930-)

• Nietzsche influence:

• Language is radically metaphorical in nature
• Every idea originates through an equating of the unequal
• Metaphors are essentially groundless
• All assumptions must be questioned
• Must consider vast plurality of “wills to power”

Jaques Derrida (1930-)

• “What, therefore, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms; truths are illusions of which one has forgotten that they are illusions…”

• -- Nietzsche