ThAct :Derrida and Deconstruction

 This activity is a part of my academic writing...

 ⚫What do you understand by deconstruction?

Deconstruction involves the close reading of texts in order to demonstrate that any given text has irreconcilably contradictory meanings, rather than being a unified, logical whole.Deconstruction was both created and has been profoundly influenced by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida.

⚫How to deconstruct a text?

👉Oppose Prevailing Wisdom

The first thing you’ll have to do is question the common meaning or prevailing theories of the text you're deconstructing. When deconstructing, you need to start from a place of critical opposition. The only assumption you can make is that the meaning of the text is unstable and what others have told you about it is based on their own assumptions. In other words, you need to be skeptical from the onset. If you’re deconstructing Shakespeare’s Sonnet No. 18, which famously begins, “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day,” you can’t assume the poet is talking about a woman or that a woman is inherently an apt object for summery figurative language. 

👉Expose Cultural Bias

Practitioners of the deconstructive method refer to cultural biases in texts in a number of lofty ways, calling them "binaries" and "hierarchical oppositions." To understand these interchangeable terms, remember that certain words and the concepts they represent are often privileged, or emphasized more, than their oppposite words and concepts -- rich over poor, male over female, enlightened over ignorant. 

👉Analyze Sentence Structure

One way to investigate underlying meaning of a text is to analyze sentence structure, specifically the arrangement of subject and object. Ask yourself if a person or thing represented as an object in the text makes it subordinate to the subject in some way. For instance, if a novel's male protagonist is always the initiator of action rather than the recipient -- “He took her to the store; he bought her earrings; he found some food she would like” -- the recurrent sentence structure may reinforce the protagonist’s power over the dependent character. Look for these patterns and determine if the points of view of other characters are limited to favor cultural bias.

👉Play With Possible Meanings

After you’ve analyzed the text for biases, see if your discoveries support a new interpretation. While many associate deconstruction with destruction of meaning, the opposite is true. 

⚫What is deconstruction example?

Deconstruction is defined as a way of analyzing literature that assumes that text cannot have a fixed meaning. An example of deconstruction is reading a novel twice, 20 years apart, and seeing how it has a different meaning each time.A philosophical theory of textual criticism; a form of critical analysis.Its examples follows the steps like...

1) on the fact that deconstruction sees all writing as a complex historical, cultural process rooted in the relations of texts to each other and in the institutions and conventions of writing, and

 2) on the sophistication and intensity of its sense that human knowledge is not as controllable or as convincing as Western thought would have it and that language operates in subtle and often contradictory ways, so that certainty will always elude us.

Thank you...