I have come to ask your help wise men of /lit/: i need to give a presentation about deconstruction and show an example through a (norwegian) book. When doing a deconstructive analysis am i supposed to try and argue with every fucking established thing or only with major thoughts and themes? Not sure if i understand the whole thing properly. Also general deconstruction thread.
>>7779891
Plz halp
>>7779891
>focus exclusively on the text itself
>list major possible interpretations, both on a textual and a grammatic level(there's an infinte number of them so keep it to the big ones)
>go into detail on how those interpetations interact with eachother, how they contradict and interplay with each other
Stave churches are fucking beautiful.
I highly recommend seeing them before edgy black metal kids burn the rest down.
>>7779918
I've read that focusing on the text only was a mistranslation and derrida actally meant nothing can be considered out of text, everything is relevant, so just the opposite. Thanks for the other stuff though!
>>7779922
Those burnt down got rebuilt, not the same thing of course but still pretty
Just repeatedly state that you:
>don't understand what the author meant
>continuously heighten the fact verbal language is flawed
>call the act in itself a ever moving action without a start, culmination or ending
That should neutralize everyone who tries to object to anything you say
>>7779938
Thanks! Any idea on a book anyone? I've only read Hamsun but my presentation was on him last year
>>7779954
Er oversettelser tillatt eller må den være skrevet av en nordmann?
Hva med Amalie Skrams Hellemyrsfolket?
>>7779954
Don't thank him, he's a moron. "Aim" of deconstruction isn't to be "right" in the sense that nobody can attack you.
I think it's gonna be tough to give an example of deconstruction if you don't already know the subject well. What did you read on the subject?
I et speil, i en gåte - Gaarder
It's a kid's book but perfect for this.
>>7780091
Thank you i'll look it up!
>>7779891
Say word. I just did a paper looking at Robert Frost's "Out, Out" through a bunch of critical theories including deconstruction. I wasn't sure about my understanding of the the theory either, but see what you think:
>>7780126
Frost's poem is readily available online, btw.
>There is an implication of a day/night binary opposition in the use of the word “day” throughout the poem, and generally in the use of daytime as a setting. Privilege is traditionally assigned to “day.” The “day was all but done” when “the boy” has his accident, so presumably, the oncoming dark of the night would signify malice and violence where the bright of the day signifies peace and harmony. This distribution of privilege is reinforced by explicit mention of the sun setting and the boy put in the “dark of ether.”
>>7780128
>Privileging night instead of day could result in a new signified of the loggers’ indifference to the boy’s death perhaps being some kind of freak occurrence, a transformation in behavior analogous to the transformation of day into night, the peace and harmony of the first few verses being the boring, monotonous status quo and the violence and the social indifference being a sudden interjection of chaos and negativity. Perhaps the loggers’ reaction to the boy’s death is only a demarcation point in a spectrum ranging from the sense of a tight-knight community to individual alienation, as opposed to a sad general fact of human behavior as implied by the previous interpretations. Equalizing “day” and “night” could simply result in the New Critical interpretation above, in which daytime serenity and the evening tragedy are already equalized.
>>7780131
>There is also an implication of an “in/out” binary in the use of the word “out” in the title and throughout the body of the poem. Traditionally as well as in the poem, privilege is given to “in,” “out” signifying loss of light in Macbeth’s “out, out, brief candle,” loss of peace in the workplace when the saw “leaps out” at the boy’s hand and loss of life when the boy “[puffs] his lips out with his breath” at the end. But traditionally, “out” is sometimes privileged, such as in “school’s out,” at least when uttered by Alice Cooper and high and elementary schoolers, as well as in “coming out of the closet.” A privileged “out” in the poem could then perhaps be taken to signify a relatively merciful escape for the boy from child labor and a milieu that allows such a thing, the poem being a sad political protest thereof instead of a simple lament about the indifference of the universe.
>tfw you come into this thread hoping for tangential suggestions of good Norwegian lit.
>tfw you were disappointed again
>>7780132
As for a book to read, I haven't read it myself, but what about Knausgard's My Struggle?
>>7780132
Interesting, do you think you could come to a newer interpretation after arriving at the protest one? I'll try to refute derrida by saying interpretations are limited because of the satisfaction felt at a new one makes you stick with it
>>7780157
>do you think you could come to a newer interpretation after arriving at the protest one?
I briefly contemplated writing something about technology, for which the chainsaw is a metonymy, getting "out" of man's hands, due to the privileging of "out" in combination with the personification of the chainsaw in the poem.
I just realized I completely neglected to write in the paper about how all these interpretations interact with each other, contradicting and/or confirming here and there and/or entirely, because the entire point of deconstruction, I think, is that no text has stable foundations due to all the vagaries of privilege, etymology, grammar and basically because human beings are imperfect communicators. keep that in mind.
>>7780196
Btw I didn't think of it as a chainsaw when reading, more like a sawmill: it says leaped out at too not leaped out of. Very hard to cut your own hand with a chainsaw. Thanks for the comments lots of good points
MOAR deconstructed texts
>>7780334
Once again a point to refute derrida i think, even if it referred to a chainsaw some readers would now it was unlikely and others would know it was unlikely and some would not so obviously there are considerations outside the text
>>7780061
If you still have months, you could read some to familiarize yourself with his work. Maybe "Signature Event Context" to begin with
>>7779891
Derrida mentions on how the word "Pharmakon" (which is mentioned in Plato's Phaedrus) is a word that can mean both "remedy/cure" as well as "poison" (two different definitions, which completely conflict with one another in regards to meaning). Simply put, for Derrida, words in themselves are "ambivalent" (a term later to be used by Homi K. Bhabha). As such, Derrida coins the term "differance" as a means to explain how words can have different meanings (or definitions) and how people can defer meaning between the multiple definitions of the words themselves. (Differance=deferring between the differences).
To further prove this point, Derrida went to great lengths in his life to "reinterpret" the works of other writers (giving their texts new meanings). This is also why many scholars, like Noam Chomsky (whom I greatly admire), say that Derrida completely misunderstands the scholars and thinkers that he cites and summarizes in the text of the work itself. In truth, however, this so-called "misinterpretation" is done intentionally by Derrida to show that the text can have multiple interpretations, and, as such, that one can pull away any meaning they want to from a particular work. For Derrida, the text is alive and open to interpretation, regardless of what meaning the author may have initially intended (hence the "Death of the Author" as Barthes proposed).
Marshall McLuhan was also a huge influence on Derrida with his idea of “The Medium is the Message.” In other words, how you convey something is what it is you are trying to convey. This is why Derrida never states his ideas outright, but, rather, he hints at them through his writing obscurantist style. This also explains why Derrida was fond of putting words in parentheses, and crossing out words instead of deleting or erasing them outright. Because, when you do that, you do (not) know how the text should be interpreted.
>>7781907
Puns apart, there seems to be a misunderstanding there!
Derrida's purpose isn't to show you that you can pull any meaning you want from any text. Of course a text is alive and open to interpretation, though it's not a way of saying "everything I say is right because the text is open".
When "de-constructing", it's rather a matter of showing how a text could be led to a point where it starts working against itself, where the non-thought opposition couples start to collapse (and then, how they were sustaining the text)...
I hear what you mean, but Derrida was a very attentive reader and certainly wasn't aiming to say "you could just say whatever comes to your mind". You could actually see in his work that he's trying to really pay justice to whom he's reading. What I mean is one should not think Derrida's simply tries to "torn" apart, for the pleasure, what any author may say. He seriously tries to think how such or such text is working (and, indeed, there's always something which is escaping from what we may understand. That doesn't mean we should "mis-read")
>>7781975
>pull meaning out of the text
I agree with you. We have to understand that meaning is made by associating with cultural signs and symbols. There is no pre-set meaning. Still, this is something more akin to social constructivism and existentialism than Derrida's ideas (though a lot of people like to associate it with him for some reason).
>everything I say is right due to interpretation
Nothing is right or wrong. I like to think of words as yin-yang symbols. Some people see the yin while others see the yang. But both halves are necessary to make the whole (and both halves made the word ambivalent unto itself). Therefore, words sort of nullify themselves (like matter and anti-matter mixed together).
