*We can't look to the author because the author doesn't know what the text means.
*Deconstruction refutes this idea and says there is no outside the text. We have framed the text to include the words on the page. Everything is a text.
*A text is a series of signs and signals.
Deconstruction: a critique of the assumption that language is stable
*Fish would say that poetry is not a collection of words like New Critics would say, but poetry is whatever you happen to see when you have poetry seeing eyes.
*New Criticism dictates that with it we can make a judgement about whether a text is good or bad.
*Deconstructionism believes that signifiers have arbitrary links to signified. There is no absolute connection to things.
Realist: (New Critic) believes that there are real substantial and absolute links between a word and the things that they denote
Nominalist: (Deconstructionist) believes that there are words that have no signifies. They're just names (nomina) Words don't mean anything
*There is no truth. And in the absence of truth, there is only power.
*What you bring to the text is also part of the text. The interpretation of the dream is also part of the dream.
*Derrida believed that writing is more important than speech. He also believed that the binary opposition between speech and writing needed to be overturned.
*The existential world is random and our lives are absurd
*Plato condemned writing in writing
Pharmakon: a word meaning remedy as well as poison
*When you decide one meaning, you're automatically priviliging one over the other. A deconstructor must overturn the opposition because oppositions need to be overturned
Paul de Man: Deconstructionist - Language is rhetorical interpretation
Wimsatt: formalist/New Critic - 1. Intentional Fallacy 2. Affective Fallacy
Edgar Allen Poe: classicist - Literature must have only one single effect
Stanley Fish (aka Fishy Foo): Reader Response - The meaning of a text is determinded by what the reader brings to a text. Poetry is whatever one sees with poetry seeing eyes
Mary Wollstonecraft: 1st feminist - Educate women like men
Carl Jung: Depth psychologist - archetypes are pre-existing patterns
Thomas Love Peacock: Romantic satirist - critic of poetry
Ralph Waldo Emerson: transcendentalist - Poet is inspired by god - an eyeball that sees everything
Jane Tomkins: feminist - personal way of critical writing - Get Out of the Straight Jacket
Vico: "original" - Four ages (Gods, Heros, Men, Chaos)
Hugh of St. Victor: Classical theologian - picking berries and popping them into our mouths "This is just to say I have eaten the plums that were in the icebox and which you were probably saving for breakfast. Forgive me. They were delicious so sweet and so cold"
Homi Bhabha: post colonialist - breaks down the Western binary tradition of haves and have nots
Nietzsche: existentialist - truth is a mobile army of metaphors
Mikhail Bhaktin: structuralist - Monologic versus dialogic Beavis and Butthead
Roland Barthes: structuralist moving towards post structuralism - language speaks not the author
Simone de Beauvoir: canonical feminist - We are free to invent ourselves
Julia Kristeva: "Feminist" psychoanalyst - merged the disciplines of her colleagues - semanalysis Linguistics dissolve the sign
Laura Mulvey: feminist - The Male Gaze
Henry Lewis Gates: deconstructionist - race is a text
Gilbert and Gubar: feminists - Anxiety of authorship and anxiety of influence
Todorov: structuralist - simple clauses form a plot
Schliermacher: Romantic - hermenutics - the science of interpretation
Schiller: Romantic - "in error only is there truth"
Eagleton: Marxist - Literature plays a role in the cultural, social and political spheres
Stephen Greenblatt: New Historicist - the text is history and history is text
Wordsworth: Romantic - poetry is the spontaneous overflow of poweful emotions
Walter Benjamin: Social Historian - percetion of aesthetics changes social history - "aura"
Judith Butler: feminist/queer theorist - Gender is a construct