When reading this chapter I kept thinking of "Princes Bride" and the line Inigo Montoya says, hence the tittle of this blog.
The first part of this chapter felt like Bressler was saying a whole bunch of things and yet he didn't even know what he was talking about. I will give an example. On page 107 when he is talking about Derrida changing the way one looks at binary operations he says "Such a reversal is possible because truth is ever elusive, for we can always de-center the center if any be found." If that's not someone just trying to sound smart I don't know what is. Frankly I was worried that this chapter was going to be a repeat of the confusion I felt in the last chapter especially since there were a few pages that were taken straight from chapter 5.
Thankfully, in the last few pages of this chapter Bressler actually goes into what it takes to do a Deconstructional analysis of a text. I realized that I tend to read with a deconstruction point of view. I like to find new ways of looking at texts and Deconstruction allows a reader to come up with new ways of looking at a text that has been read and re-read.
Deconstruction is fun because it puts so much emphasis on the reader. It can become like a game finding new meanings by putting importance on things that the writer hasn't stressed.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
I get what you’re saying about the whole confusion thing.. but to be honest, I think the structuralism was shaky ground, now we're getting to more sound and more stable grounds.
ReplyDeleteI like that you also (i.e me too) noticed that "deconstruction puts so much emphasis on the reader." This was established with the reader-response theory and then lost (like many things) when structuralism was introduced. But now that that's gone, like a passing storm that attempted to disrupt us, everything is settling back to normal... :) well, we'll see about that anyway.