Try to Deconstruct.......

     Being a student of Department of English, we have a topic to learn in our study, that is "Deconstruction". Derrida 

a famous critic has given this term. 

What is Deconstruction?
     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 the determinate 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 undecidable possibilities.
     Derrida was the most influential philosopher in 70s and 80s of last century. His philosophy is the further extension of structuralism and is better called as Post-Structuralism. He carries this structuralist movement to its logical extreme and his reasoning is original and startling. We have seen in this movement that as in New Criticism, the attention was shifted from the writer to the work of literary text; consequently textual analysis became more important than extra textual information. Further, the author disappeared and only the text remained. This is what we called the stylistic and structuralist position. The meaning as it emerges from the text (the illocutionary force) alone counted. In this process the importance of the reader and his understanding increased, and the Reader Response or Reception Theory came into being. Derrida gives the same process a further and final push according to which what matters is the reading and not the writing of the text. At times one feels, though not quite justifiably, that, in Derrida even the text disappears and what is left behind is an individual’s reader response to it. Now the reader rules the supreme, and the validity of his reading can not be challenged. However, the structure of each reading has to be coherent and convincing.

Deconstuction of a story:

Its a regular common story of a cap seller and monkeys.in which a cap seller gets his caps back by a trick. But I would like to deconstruct this story. 

Deconstruction of a Story

A cap seller and clever monkeys

     Once there was a village. In the village one cap seller was living. He has to go everyday to another village to sell his caps. As usual one day he was going to another village and passing from a jungle. He felt tired and found a shade of a tree and sleep there for a while. He was tired, so soon he went in deep sleep. 

     The tree, under which he was taking rest, was a house of so many monkeys. They saw a bag of caps and took all the caps one by one and wore it. When the cap seller woke up he saw his caps were not in the bag. He saw monkeys over him wearing his caps. He has took his stick to threat monkeys but they did the same. They cut branches of the tree and shown the sticks to the cap seller. Now he thought that if the monkeys are copying him then he should throw his cap, so that every monkey will throw caps. He did as he thought. Monkeys were observing him. And when he thrown his cap down, one monkey jumped down and took that cap and went on the tree. 

     The cap seller was surprised, he ask himself loudly that why monkeys didn't throw their caps.? Suddenly one monkey throw a picture story book in which the story of Clever Cap Seller and Monkeys were shown. They had observed the pictures in that story book and learnt that they shold not do as their predecessors has done. 

Moral: Don't underastimate the power of a common monkey...