It refers to approaches to understanding the relationship between text and meaning.
Jacques Derrida first introduced it in his book Of Grammatology (1967).
Derrida defined it as a turn away from Platonism's ideas of "true" forms and essences.
Derrida published several works on the concept of Deconstruction, like Différance, Speech and Phenomena, and Writing and Difference.
Derrida took inspiration from the work of Ferdinand de Saussure.
Language as a system of signs and words only has meaning because of the contrast between these signs.
Deconstruction is defined as analyzing literature that assumes that text cannot have a fixed meaning.
It has inspired a range of studies in the humanities, including:
Law and anthropology,
Historiography,
Linguistics and sociolinguistics,
Psychoanalysis,
LGBT studies, and feminism.
It also inspired deconstructivism in architecture and remains an important aspect of art, music, and literary Criticism today.
A "close" reading strategy elicits the ways that key terms and concepts may be paradoxical or self-undermining, rendering their meaning undecidable.
Example: Deconstruction is reading a novel twice, 20 years apart, and seeing how it has a different meaning each time.
This connects directly to Derrida's Theory of Deconstruction and the concept of the binary.
To deconstruct is to bypass all preconceived notions of the binary oppositions underlying our understanding of society and language and not to treat concepts as if some were different from others.
Jacques Derrida's writings constitute the basis of this poststructuralist theory. Deconstruction proposes that meaning, as accessed through language, is indeterminate due to the indeterminacy of language itself.
This system of signifiers is not completely “meaningful”; a word may refer to an object, but it cannot be the object itself.
Derrida developed deconstruction as a response to certain forms of Western philosophy; in the United States, deconstruction was embraced by a group of literary theorists at Yale, including Paul de Man and Geoffrey Hartman.
In literary critique, deconstruction refocuses attention on the open-ended nature of work, the endless scope for interpretation, and the far-reachings of authorial intentions.
Deconstruction traces how language generates meaning both within a text and across texts, while insisting that such meaning can only ever be provisional.
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