Preface to New Edition. Preface to First Edition Introduction Chapter 1: Readers and Reading 1. New Fortunes 2. Reading as a Woman 3. Stories of Reading Chapter 2: Deconstruction 1. Writing and Logocentrism 2. Meaning and Iterability 3. Grafts and Graft 4. Institutions and Inversions 5. Critical Consequences Chapter 3: Deconstructive Criticism Bibliography. Index

She might have deplored the sentiment, had it come from one of her students. "What we need," she was saying, trying hard not to whine, "is a short cut, a simple guide, a kind of recipe for each of these theories, telling us step by step how to make a particular reading." It was the second week of a three-week institute dedicated to the proposition that all teachers were created equal and that therefore all should share in the excitement and challenge of the on-going transformation of literary criticism. But these teachers, it was clear, were just on the verge of saying, "Let's just pretend that nothing important has happened since, oh, 1967." I had whipped them into an evangelistic fever at the outset of the institute, ready to receive the spirit of critical theory; and they had read so much and worked so hard. But I nodded. She was right. They were mired in complexity and subtleties. I realized, of course, that no one whose loaf was fully sliced would seriously attempt an overview of recent critical theory in a few pages. But all they needed was to get their bearings, and then the confusion of ideas bouncing around in their heads would probably start falling into some comprehensible order. So I came up with the briefest of guides to some of the recent critical theory, an overview that would succeed when its users began to understand its limitations. My strategy was to show how a single passage might be treated by a handful of different critical theories-certainly not every theory available, but enough to show how theory shapes practice and to help my students with those most puzzling them. Although multiple readings of the same work are easy to assemble and useful, my effort not only had the virtue of a calculated simplicity and brevity, it also displayed the same reader attempting to act as the extension of various different interpretive codes. The passage I chose, a wonderful excerpt from Brendan Gill's Here at the New Yorker, is itself brief, but also rich. In offering these notes I am assuming that my reader, like those teachers, knows enough about recent critical theory to be confused. Obviously, my theorizing will be alarmingly reductive, and the examples won't illustrate what any student at any level can produce, given a sketch of this or that theory. They illustrate only what I can do to provide in a very small space an example of a particular kind of critical behavior. But my teacher/students, as well as my student/students, have found these discussion/examples helpful, and so I'll proceed immediately to Gill's text and then mine, before anyone gets cut on any of these slashes.

On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism

A Passage into Critical Theory.

This paper is concerned with the representation in academic journal articles and textbooks of an organisation theory. In the case of Burns’ and Stalker’s book The Management of Innovation (1961,1966), summaries of the text by other scholars have arguably differed from the original authors and among themselves in their emphases. Similar points have been made about representations of other theorists such as Kurt Lewin and, perhaps most famously, Adam Smith. They all raise issues about the meanings of texts and where such meanings lie: with the author, the reader, the text itself or perhaps some combination of these. They also raise questions about whether texts can be shown to have definitive meanings; and if not, whether there are any criteria for adjudicating on the validity of varied interpretations.

Analysis of a Text and its Representations: Univocal Truth or a Situation of Undecidability?

Mohammed Arkoun is one of an international Islamic modern thinker that his thought comes into Islamic thinking discourses in Indonesia recently. His Islamic thought were influenced by the modern philosophy concepts such as “myths” of Paul Ricouer, postmodern concepts like ‘discourse’ and ‘episteme’, which were developed by Michel Foucault as well as ‘deconstruction’ of Jacques Derrida. If Derrida focused on deconstruction of a discourse as a final concept, on the other hand Arkoun insisted that ‘deconstruction’ must be followed by ‘reconstruction’. Arkoun’s reconstruction leaves the limitation, the rigidity and deviation from the past. Arkoun proposes two ways: firstly it is ‘ijtihâd’ and subsequently it is Islamic critical reason with the whole of critical meaning. In this research the method I used was library investigation. Based on the result I came into the conclusion that Arkoun loss the communication with the scholars in the Islamic world, particularly in the Middle East tradition. Since then, he applied the method of deconstruction that Islamic world percept it was going too far.

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On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism

Citations

A Passage into Critical Theory.

Analysis of a Text and its Representations: Univocal Truth or a Situation of Undecidability?

Kritik Pemikiran Arab: Metode Dekonstruksi Mohammed Arkoun

At the edge of the known

Bonded by Reading: An Interrogation of Feminist Praxis in the Works of Marcela Serrano in the Light of Its Reception by a Sample of Women Readers

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