Decon-struction can only speak in the language of the thing it criticizes...Theonly things one really deconstructs are things into which one is intimatelymired.’

an anomaly’

nebulous

‘Orientalism

‘Commonwealth literature

He believes that recent criticism overstates the ‘limitless-ness’ of interpretation because it cuts the connections between text and actuality

decentred consciousness

possessive exclusivis

n fact, Said’s orientation has always been more materialist than de-construction conventionally allow

free’ point outside the object of analysis

the Occident

polemical

hegemonic

mperialist subject

nified humanist subject,

metaphysic

ethnocentrism

caveat

ost-structuralist thought represents a body of reflection upon the same issuesthat concern commentators on postmodern literature and culture.

‘grand narratives’

roject of modernity

par excellence

there is no ‘free’ position ‘outside’ theory, and to vacate the domainof theory on the assumption that there is such a position is at once to be embroiled in the subjectivism of an ‘untheorized politics of personal experi-ence’,

sperm as the active seeds which give form to the waiting ovum,which lacks identity till it receives the male’s impress.

impresses its form upon the malleable

form is masculineand matter feminine

Anarchism

four main reasons

heterogeneous

chauvinism

Freud’s theory

Deconstruction show how such oppositions, in order to hold themselves in place, are betrayed into inverting or collapsing themselves, or need to to the text's margins certain niggling details which can be made

Perhaps she as a sign of something in man himself which he needs to repress, beyond his own being, relegate to a securely alien region beyond his definitive limits. Perhaps what is outside is also somehow inside, what also intima

But equally man is what he is only by virtue of ceaselessly shutting this other or opposite, defining himself in antithesis to it, and his· whole is therefore caught up and put at risk in the very gesture by which seeks to assert his unique, autonomous existence.

circular

no fixed distinction between sigoifiers and signifieds

no harmonious one-to-one set of correspondence

metaphysical

estranged

palpable

This natural language gives us reality 'as it is': it does not -like or Symbolism -distort it into subjective shapes, but repre-world to us as God himself might know

he 'healthy' sign, for Barthes, is one which draws attention to arbitrariness -which does not try to palm itself off as 'natural' but in the very moment of conveying a meaning, communicates some-of its own rel

All d . . ne Sigmfier to another is what "tirluaUy to fill. Hum,;, lang~:;: ;~~~~g; from a la~k, which it strives which signs designate the f: hy such lack. the absence of the of the absence and exclusio~ f ahct t at words have meaning only by o ot ers

In gaining access to language, the small child unco1nsc:i011~ learns that a sign has meaning only by dint of its difference from other and learns also that a sign presupposes the absence of the object it

a 'symbiotic' relatio

ceaseless closed exchange

?arapraxes

~reams allow us on<' ot o few privileged glimpses of it at work. Dreams for Freud are essentia symbolic fulfilments of unconscious wishes; and they are cast in form because if this material were expressed directly then it shocking and disturbing enough to wake us u,V

The child has now developed an ego or individual i<\entity, a particular place in the sexual, familial and social networks; but it can do this only by, so to speak, splitting off its guilty desires, repressing ' them into the unconsciou

sublimating

eurosi

~ ego, unable as in neuro~s partly to repress the unconscious desire, actually comes under its sway. If this happens, the link between the ego and the external world is ruptured, and the unconscious begins to build-up an alternative, delusi~mal reatii

Wh . ~t> IS that in this period such . ory. at zs perhaps expenences becom · . way as a systematic field of knowled e e constituted m a as psychoanalysis developed b s· g

superego

Oedipus complex.

n which we ~ack an! centre of self

A great work of literature does not give us a properly conceptual understandingof reality but neither does it merely express the ideology of a particular class

possess a ‘progressive’outlook, glimpsing the developments of the future in the lineaments of thepresent, and giving a sense of the ideal possibilities of social developmentfrom the point of view of the mass of working people

The problem for Marx was to explain how an art andliterature produced in a long-obsolete social organization can still give usaesthetic pleasure and be regarded as ‘a standard and unattainable ideal

reader is always aware that the work is notitself reality but rather ‘a special form of reflecting reality

To ‘reflect’ is ‘to frame a mentalstructure’ transposed into words.

Greek tragedy

delusory

internalization of social norms

Omniscient narration

'fly on the wall'

'ca~era's .eye'

Feminist criticism has been especially interested in the way that Euro-pean and American narratives frequendy posit a male reader: the reader is implicidy addressed as one who shares a masculine view.