Readings for March 31
March 30, 2008
I really could identify with the student quoted in Appleman’s chapter 5: “Deconstruction is dumb. It’s people who want to feel important trying to destroy meaning.” My point of view isn’t as aggressively anti-intellectual (I hope), but I have to admit to concern about teasing meanings out of texts that the authors never intended. I say this because of the one time I was deconstructed. I had just drawn an illustration in class of a scene from Their Eyes Were Watching God. It showed Tea Cake and Janie facing each other, holding hands – and I had drawn Tea Cake about half a head taller than Janie. Men are generally taller than women, right? So I drew Tea Cake taller. But then my teacher (who I like a great deal but will remain nameless for the purposes of this anecdote) got hold of the drawing. She suggested that my drawing showed sexism because I drew Tea Cake taller than Janie. In fact, I meant no such thing. It really made me angry.
Understand that I’m not saying we should abandon deconstruction because it might upset an author. But what is the point of finding some hidden, unintended meaning in a work, other than, perhaps, the mental gymnastics we have to go through to arrive at that point? Of course, mental gymnastics can be a good thing if the mind needs a workout. So can seeing other points of view. But plucking points of view out of thin air? I’m not so sure.
The last two chapters were not nearly as provocative as the chapter on deconstruction. Between them, I found the metamorphosis of Appleman’s teacher friend Martha to be most interesting. When she started teaching she relied most heavily on the standard textbook. But as time progressed she began choosing more and more pieces of literature from sources other than the textbook. Now, she says, students use the text as a doorstop. Martha also talks about using the various literary lenses: reader response, Marxist, feminist and deconstructionalist. Her classes sound so much more interesting than what I’ve been teaching through this year of practicum. Maybe that’s the reason I should be teaching all lenses, not just the ones in my comfort zone.
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March 30th, 2008 at 3:23 pm
I like your story about being deconstructed. You may even deconstruct that story and say that it reveals more about the person who viewed it as sexist than you yourself. My problem is that deconstruction is so difficult to define. I wouldn’t mind doing the “mental gymnastics” in the classroom, but I see your point about reading “too much” into something. Sometimes if you spend too much time analyzing what may or may not be hidden in the text, you can miss what is on the surface or most important about the text. (Although, of course, it is our social construction that determines what is “most important” about a text).
March 31st, 2008 at 12:34 pm
I actually remember that episode with the drawing, packers, and it was very interesting, and I’m sure also very uncomfortable. But I do not think you were the one deconstructed; it was a text you created. And, just like we tell our students to support their answers with the text, so, too, did that professor. I hope that even the most pretentious critc, deconstruction or otherwise, would not claim to be able to decode a person.
But with texts, yes. And literary deconstruction can help students form more malleable views of texts, instead of the binaries that Appleman describes (105). I like the visual you create with “mental gymnastics,” and I know my students could use the limbering up. I think this lens can unlock a lof of power within students. Using the lenses gives everyone a focus and hopefully something to say, whereas just text analysis can lead to pulling at threads and “plucking points of view out of thin air.”
March 31st, 2008 at 2:46 pm
I think that deconstruction doesn’t so much find unintended meaning in a writer’s works as it examines the unintended consequences of using language to communicate.
Deconstruction rejects the structuralist ideal of a penultimate meaning; such claims of certain meaning are denounced as so much linguistic bullying. Deconstruction rejects the idea that language has definitive meaning, and embraces the idea that language will change depending on the perspective (or lens) that it is viewed through. Deconstruction rejects the fallacy of logocentrism (unquestionable truth, and embraces the infinite possibility of meaning… While it may be uncomfortable to be the object of deconstruction, the act engenders discussion, questions, and attempts at explanation, which only furthers our education and increases the breadth of our knowledge through experience.
–Ludlow