Paraphrasing How To Deconstruct Almost Anything:
The basic enterprise of contemporary literary criticism is actually quite simple. It is based on the observation that with a sufficient amount of clever handwaving and artful verbiage, you can interpret any piece of writing as a statement about anything at all.
Step 1 — Select a work to be deconstructed.
Step 2 — Decide what the text says.
Step 3 — Identify within the reading a distinction of some sort.
Step 4 — Convert your chosen distinction into a “hierarchical opposition” by asserting that the text claims or presumes a particular primacy, superiority, privilege or importance to one side or the other of the distinction.
Step 5 — Derive another reading of the text, one in which it is interpreted as referring to itself.Another minor point, by the way, is that we don’t say that we deconstruct the text but that the text deconstructs itself. This way it looks less like we are making things up.
The Pseudo Politically Correct term that I would use to describe the mind set of postmodernism is “epistemologically challenged”: a constitutional inability to adopt a reasonable way to tell the good stuff from the bad stuff.
Loading ...
about graham
