A DECONSTRUCTIONIST ARRAIGNMENT OF READING

Abstract

Deconstructive readers are interested in ironies, aporias, paradoxes, contradictions, conflicts, parenthesis, ambiguities, puns, multiple meanings, linguistic peculiarities, intertextuality, repetitions, etc. Deconstructive readers give you an idea about in the ways a text says something different from what it aims to imply or the ways texts do not always mean. According to Barbara Johnson, “The reader’s task is to read what is written rather than simply attempt to perceive what might have been meant” (25). In this regard, deconstruction is an analog of New Criticism and other formalisms. Deconstruction in some respects is merely a synonym for ‘analysis’, which means that the title of this research paper is a tautology. It is not a synonym for ‘destruction’. Though the American style of deconstruction as operational tenets for literary criticism has now lost its significance, the deconstructive strategies of critical analysis have been commonly used so far. Deconstructive criticism, as Culler concludes, is not the application of philosophical lessons to literary studies, but an exploration of textual logic in texts called literarily. This paper is essentially an analysis—a breaking down of a complex text into its various elements and a close assessment of those elements, especially the elements that most need examination because of the difficulties, ambiguities, or problems that they pretend.