Hi...could someone please explain Derrida's deconstructivist theory to me? Many thanks in anticipation.?

Answer 1

Derrida's approach focuses mainly on language. He fights against the traditional Western idea that language is capable of expressing ideas without changing them, and - applied to a text - that the meaning of a written text is solely the result of the author's intention. Derrida believes that the language itself can create meaning, independent of the author's will, and that a given text does not have an unchanging meaning. Deconstructivism thus opened up a multitude of possible ways of interpreting text or any act of language, by seeking out its multiple layers of meaning. By deconstructing (pretty much in the way described by the other person who answered your question) the work of previous writers or scholars, Derrida showed that language is changing, that in an act of speech or writing there isn't an inherent, unconditional clarity, but that meaning is created by the ambivalence (or indeed, multi-valence) of a word, a phrase etc, by its historical, cultural, psychological etc. connotations and not solely by the intention of its author. Just think of the word "n****r" in literature for instance. Did it have the same meaning in Mark Twain's books as in the books written by a representative of the Harlem Renaissance? Comparing the way words, images, idea etc. have been used before, deconstructivism seeks to uncover new meanings.

More broadly, deconstructivism as theory was also applied as a method in literature as well as other domains, such as film (see Tarantino's "Pulp Fiction") or architecture (see Frank Gehry). As a method, it implies rejection of the usual ways of constructing a text, or a film or a building, and using the traditional constitutive elements in a disjointed way. In literature and film, the breaking of the sequence of causality, of the natural flow of the narrative (remember how Tarantino plays with scenes in Pulp Fiction?), in architecture, constitutive elements of a building are re-arranged in un-conventional unusual ways, producing disjointed forms.

Answer 2

i applied it to the literary text, i hope this could help you. it is more about the fact of understanding a text. in his opinion the better way to do this is to deconstruct the text into minimal unities of meaning( words, phonemes...)
this theory is related from one point of view with intertextuality. when one deconstructs a text one can easily observe its connections with other texts.
so in literature it has to do more with the analysis of a text, and the meaning of language is the "star"
hope this helps. this is pretty difficult to explain.

Answer 3

Probably not, because to be honest no one really understands it. And no one really understands it because it is essentially gibberish. Indeed, Continental philosophy generally is typically meaningless.

Answer 4

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deconstruction