Deconstruction

Deconstructionism is a type of literary criticism, or perhaps a philosophical approach to criticism, which involves analyzing cultural products ("reading a text") such as a novel and deconstructing the assumptions and beliefs that make up both the way the text was created, and the way the text is received. The former might be considered a type of contextualization; the latter is related to audience studies.

Deconstructionism is strongly tied to the work of Jacques Derrida, and has been followed by numerous scholars including the "Yale School" (Paul de Man, Geoffrey Hartman, J. Hillis Miller), Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, etc, etc. Although in theory deconstruction can be applied to any text, and has influenced certain schools of literary/film/etc. criticism, it is best known for its application to key texts of philosophy and social sciences (anthropology and psychology). Derrida famously deconstructed Claude Levi-Strauss, for instance, in Of Grammatology, a study of which is common in academic literary criticism programs.

Deconstruction has been significant to postcolonial studies, postmodernism, queer theory, and audience theory.

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