Abstract
In an essay published in 1983, ‘Composition and Decomposition: Deconstruction and the Teaching of Writing’,1 I argued that all good readers as well as all good writers have always been ‘deconstructionists’. Deconstruction was defined as presupposing a methodical awareness of the disruptive power that figures of speech exert over the plain construable ‘grammatical’ sense of language, on the one hand, and over the apparent rigour of logical argumentation on the other. I concluded from this that rhetoric in the sense of knowledge of the intricacies of tropes should be taught in courses in composition, along with grammar and rhetoric in the sense of persuasion. Knowledge of figures of speech should also be taught in courses in reading. In the process of arguing that more attention should be given in courses both in reading and in writing to knowledge of figures of speech and their disruptive power, I discussed briefly (as examples of the way the great writers are all ‘deconstructionists’ before the fact) a passage from Plato and one from George Eliot. I propose here to analyse those passages in more detail in an attempt to identify their deconstructive rigour. It should be remembered that ‘deconstruction’ is not something that the reader does to a text; it is something that the text does to itself. The text then does something to the reader as she or he is led to recognise the possibility of two or more rigorously defensible, equally justifiable, but logically incompatible readings of the text in question.
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Notes
In Winifred Bryan Horner (ed.), Composition & Literature: Bridging the Gap (Chicago, 1983), pp. 38–56.
Phaedrus, 261d-2b, trans. R. Hackforth, in Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (eds), Plato: The Collected Dialogues (Princeton, NJ, 1963), pp. 507–8. The citations from Gorgias are from the translation by W. D. Woodhead in the same volume, pp. 229–307.
Cited by Richard A. Lanham, A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms (Berkeley, CA, 1969), p. 100.
William Wordsworth, ‘Essays upon Epitaphs’, in W. J. B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser (eds), The Prose Works (Oxford, 1974), Vol. 2, p. 81.
George Meredith, One of Our Conquerors, in Works (London, 1909–11), Vol. 17, p. 189.
Robert Moynihan, ‘Interviews with Paul de Man’, Yale Review, 73: 4 (July 1984), 580.
Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading (New Haven, CT, 1979), p. 10.
For the first see Jacques Derrida, ‘Signature Event Context’; John R. Searle, ‘Reiterating the Difference: A Reply to Derrida’, Glyph, 1 (Baltimore, MD, 1977), 172–208;
Derrida, ‘Limited Inc’, Glyph, 2 (Baltimore, MD, 1977), 162–254.
For the second see Paul de Man, ‘Sign and Symbol in Hegel’s Aesthetics’, Critical Inquiry, 8: 4 (Summer 1982), 761–75;
Raymond Geuss, ‘A Response to Paul de Man’; and Paul de Man, ‘Reply to Raymond Geuss’, Critical Inquiry, 10: 2 (December 1983), 3375–90.
For the third see M. H. Abrams, ‘The Deconstructive Angel’; and J. Hillis Miller, ‘The Critic as Host’, Critical Inquiry, 3: 3 (Spring 1977), 425–47.
For the fourth see Gerald Graff, Literature against Itself: Literary Ideas in Modern Society (Chicago, 1979);
Frank Lentricchia, After the New Criticism (Chicago, 1980). The literature about, for, and against deconstruction has since 1980 grown to impressive proportions.
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Miller, J.H. (2002). The Two Rhetorics: George Eliot’s Bestiary. In: Yousaf, N., Maunder, A. (eds) The Mill on the Floss and Silas Marner. New Casebooks. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-230-21296-1_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-230-21296-1_3
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