✦ Deconstructionism: Analysis or Discovery of Meaning? ✦
❖ Where Does Meaning Truly Reside?
The meaning of any word or sentence may be located in three possible places:
① In the mind of the author
② Within the written text itself
③ In the mind of the reader
✦ New Criticism: Reading the Text Apart from the Author
New Criticism is a literary critical movement that emphasizes detaching the text from the author’s intention.
◉ Its adherents focus solely on the text itself, ignoring both the author’s motives and the reader’s interpretations.
Key Principles of New Criticism:
✔ The text must be read with close attention.
✔ All possible meanings of every word must be considered.
✔ Meaning emerges from the interplay between words and structure within the text.
✦ Cleanth Brooks and “The Heresy of Paraphrase”
Cleanth Brooks, a central figure in New Criticism, argued in his essay “The Heresy of Paraphrase” that:
“A literary work’s meaning cannot be fully captured through summary or explanation, because meaning arises from the dynamic relationship between content and form.”
✦ Feminism and New Criticism: A Shared Method, Different Focus
While feminist literary criticism uses close reading like New Criticism, its focus is ideological, not formal.
Feminism examines:
✔ How the author portrays gender roles, especially the status of women compared to men
✔ The presence of gendered language and bias
✔ The conflicting voices within a text that generate new or subversive meanings
✦ Deconstruction: The Dissolution of Meaning
Deconstructionism, or ردِّ تشکیل, takes a more radical approach. It holds that:
No fixed or final meaning exists in a text.
According to Jacques Derrida, the founder of deconstruction:
“No matter how precisely we use language, we can never fully arrive at the original meaning.”
✦ Deconstruction in Practice
A classic example of deconstruction:
A sign on an elevator reads: “Seeing Eye Dogs Only”
Possible interpretations:
① Only guide dogs are allowed.
② Only dogs (not people) are permitted.
③ If it’s meant for blind people, how can they read it?
This shows how textual meaning can fragment depending on context, perspective, and language structure.
✦ The Paradox of Deconstruction
While deconstruction breaks down the meaning of texts, it is not immune to self-deconstruction:
➤ If a critic deconstructs a text, their own interpretation becomes subject to the same instability they attribute to the original.
This reflexive vulnerability is seen as a major flaw of deconstruction.
✦ Value of Deconstruction
Despite criticism, Thomas C. Foster, in “How to Read Literature Like a Professor”, notes that:
“Deconstruction helps us uncover how a text is shaped by its social, historical, and cultural biases.”
It reveals the underlying ideologies of an era and the contradictions embedded in language.
✦ Conclusion
✔ Deconstructionism teaches that language is inherently unstable, and meaning is always in flux.
✔ In contrast, New Criticism tries to explore a text’s internal logic and structure to approach a stable meaning.
✔ Both approaches offer critical insights, but deconstruction challenges the very foundation of meaning, including its own.
