You could even go a bit further and say that the fact that deconstruction deconstructs itself only proves its general validity.
You could, at that. In fact, I think I may have read an article at some point mentioning that very thing, now that I think about it. (I obviously tried to put the whole thing out of my mind at the time. ;))
I'm not much into Literary and Cultural Theory in general, I'm afraid. I'm all for close readings of texts as embedded in their specific historical contexts.
That's my usual strategy as well. In fact, that's about all that was taught at my college; all of our discussions centered on close readings, with occasional forays into New Historicism. I'm sure it has to do with the guy behind New Criticism (i.e. the renaissance of close readings in the 40s) being head of the English department at my school. There was a certain amount of exposure, in the classes I took, to things like deconstruction, but mostly it was looking closely at the text, and that was fine with me. *g*
Oh really? That's amazing! Possession is even on our recommended reading list, and it is taught quite often in classes on metafiction, too.
Ah, see, we had no classes on metafiction. There were two seminars offered, one on Postmodernism in general, and one on Narrative Theory, which I think included some stuff on all the various meta- vocabulary words, but I didn't take either of them. To be honest, it was pretty easy to get through the program without having much grounding in the major theories. I did it. All of my work used the same techniques applied to different texts--looking closely at the text itself, trying to make connections among the bits and pieces of that text or between it and others, or determining how it fits into its historical background. But I never really knew what schools of thought these techniques belonged to. (Still don't really have a handle on it all, actually.)
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2006-08-31 05:51 am (UTC)Excellent. *bookmarks*
You could even go a bit further and say that the fact that deconstruction deconstructs itself only proves its general validity.
You could, at that. In fact, I think I may have read an article at some point mentioning that very thing, now that I think about it. (I obviously tried to put the whole thing out of my mind at the time. ;))
I'm not much into Literary and Cultural Theory in general, I'm afraid. I'm all for close readings of texts as embedded in their specific historical contexts.
That's my usual strategy as well. In fact, that's about all that was taught at my college; all of our discussions centered on close readings, with occasional forays into New Historicism. I'm sure it has to do with the guy behind New Criticism (i.e. the renaissance of close readings in the 40s) being head of the English department at my school. There was a certain amount of exposure, in the classes I took, to things like deconstruction, but mostly it was looking closely at the text, and that was fine with me. *g*
Oh really? That's amazing! Possession is even on our recommended reading list, and it is taught quite often in classes on metafiction, too.
Ah, see, we had no classes on metafiction. There were two seminars offered, one on Postmodernism in general, and one on Narrative Theory, which I think included some stuff on all the various meta- vocabulary words, but I didn't take either of them. To be honest, it was pretty easy to get through the program without having much grounding in the major theories. I did it. All of my work used the same techniques applied to different texts--looking closely at the text itself, trying to make connections among the bits and pieces of that text or between it and others, or determining how it fits into its historical background. But I never really knew what schools of thought these techniques belonged to. (Still don't really have a handle on it all, actually.)