GENERAL IDEAS ABOUT DECONSTRUCTION:

                               

Jcques Derrida's "Structure sign and play in the discourse of the Human Sciences". This work helps in understanding deconstruction/post-structuralism and structuralism.

Structure for example language has grammar, and grammar has structure. New beginning is based on the new ending. Post modernism is standing on modernism and it is a continuous process. The whole process is associated with each other. It makes invisible structure visible. For example T.P. Kalasam's Eklavya makes the character of Eklavya visible from invisibility - character. Actions cannot be without context because actions are always contextual. Deconstruction is related to the process to apply knowledge in which context and how to use that knowledge is important.

                                     Deconstruction is philosophy of meaning; free play of meaning. The word Bet and Bat - a bird have a lot of meanings and those meanings play into our mind. To identify the meaning and true meaning of words is deconstruction. Language always empowers us. Words control us. We do not go beyond the words. If we consider one superior then it means we have already considered one inferior. Superiority of one thing and inferiority of that thing always come together and questions of ethics and morality too. It always goes on changing. We do not have general view. There are differences. Majority and Minority always come together.

                                            Binary Opposition.

·                    Superiority           Inferiority

·                    Being          -        Non-being

·                    Reality        -        Appearance /

·                    Virtue         -      Vice

·                    Day            -       Night

·                    Light           -        Darkness

·                    Male           -        Female

·                    White          -         Black

·                    Colonizer    -        Colonized

·                    Majority     -        Minority

Majority has power position and controls others and minority suffers, faces many problems. Their desires and ambitions have been suppressed. The way people use words becomes more important. Deconstruction helps us understand silence voices, ignored things which are left out. Deconstruction changes our way of looking towards different things and our perspectives. Morality and immorality's concepts become important. Deconstruction helps us in changing our thinking from genuine perspective. Subaltern Orientalism is deconstructed into practice. It helps us search true words and meanings.   Deconstruction brings the concept of universality comes. Classic - Non-classic works come. The thing which arrives after the first thing redefines the previous and the first thing. Idea becomes ideology. Meaning are given in the context. The idea of signifier and signified comes. Words have different meanings. In written words meaning dies. The spoken words are more contextualized. Written things are judged and examined by readers.

                                       
Deconstruction : Derrida's Concept.

In the criticism of literature, Deconstruction is a theory and practice of reading. Which questions and claims to 'subvert' or 'undermine' The assumption that the system of language provides grounds that are adequate to establish the boundaries. The coherence or unity, and determine meaning of a literary text. Typically, a deconstructive reading sets out to show the conflicting forces within the text itself to dissipate the seeming definiteness of its structure and meaning into indefinite array of incompatibility and undividable possibilities.

According to Derrida there is no presence or truth a part, from language. He seeks to prove that the structurality of the structure does not indicate a presence above its free play of signs. 'The centre could not be thought in the form of a being – presence', and that in any given text, there is only a free play of an infinite number of sign substitutions. A word is explained by  another word which is only a word not an existence.

 A literary text is a work of language and language as such according to Derrida, is like time, ever in a state of flux. Derrida quotes and approves Levi-Strauss who writes : "Whatever may have been the moment and the circumstances of its appearance in the scale of animal life, language could only have been born in one full swoop. Things could not have set about signifying progressively. Following a transformation the study of which is not the concern of the social sciences, but rather of biology and psychology; a crossing over about from a stage. where nothing had a meaning to another where everything possessed it".

         Logocentrism / Phonocentrism:

He tries to deconstruct the idea of prioritization. The way we look at the word. Language plays a vital role. Language is made up of words and words getting into the meaning and something will come into existence. Words cannot be measured or understood from the dictionary.  The truth and  the fact  play a vital role. Language too becomes an obstacle. Deconstruction measures the possibility of falsehood in truth. Truth does not require proof or evidence. Then why does it need the support of 'words' ? Words do not convey the exact meaning what they want to say. Truth need not be proved. The process of knowing and unknowing goes together. Knowing leads to the idea of not-knowing. Truth is independent and whenever language comes it creates deconstruction. Free play of meaning plays a vital role. Language is not natural but it can be learnt. It goes on changing. It is believed in deconstruction that spoken words are better than written words. Because spoken words are related to speech and speech is natural. The speaker who has experienced truth, he can express. Language preexists our existence. Words create a meaning and when those words  are used many time, those  words will be able to give meaning. When the same and a common concept comes repeatedly it will create meaning.

John Strurrock, "The meanings that are read into it may or may not coincide with the meanings which the author believes he or she has invested it with. A reasonable view is that a large number of these meanings will coincide depending on how far separable author and reader are in time, space and culture but that a large number of other meanings will not coincide. For language have powers of generating meaning is irrespective of the wishes of those of who use it."

 Structuralism :

It is the offshoot of certain developments in linguistics and anthropologists .Saussure's mode of the synchronoc study of language was an attempt to formulate the grammar of a language from a study of parole. Using the Saussurian  linguistic model, Claude Levi-Strauss examined the customs and conventions of some cultures with a view of arriving at the grammar of those cultures. Structuralism aims at forming a Poetics or the science of literature from a study of literary works.

Structuralism is an approach to analyzing the narrative material by examining the underlying invariant structure. For example a literary critic applying a structuralist  literary theory might say that the another of West side story did not write anything “really” new because their work has the same structure as Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. In both texts a girl and a boy fall in love despite the fact that they belong to two groups that hate each other and conflict is resolved by their death.

Structuralism argues that the "Novelty value of a "literary text" can lie only in new structure, rather than in the specifics of character development and voice in which that structure is expressed.

Structuralism as a method is peculiarly imitable to literary criticism which is a discourse upon a discourse. In Genette’s words, 'If the writer questions the universe the critic questions literature, that is to say, the universe of signs.

Literature, being primarily a work of language, and structuralism in its part, being preeminently a linguistic method, the most probable encounter should obviously take place on the terrain of linguistic material sound, forms, words and sentences constitute the common object of the linguist and the philologist to much an extent that it was possible, in the early Russian Formalist movement, to define literature as a mere dialect, and to envisage its study as an annex of general dialectology.

Genette believes that structural criticism is untainted by any of the transcendent reductions of psychoanalysis or Marxist explanation. He writes,  "It exerts, in its own way, a part of internal reduction, traversing the substance of the work in order to reach its bone-structure: Certainly not a superficial examination, but a sort of radioscopic penetration, and all the more external in that it is more penetrating". The Structuralist idea is to follow literature in its overall evolution, while making synchronoc cuts at various stages and comparing tables one with another.