Post-Structuralism Approach Review of Related Theories

unseen rather than the visible one. In addition, Cuddon in Dictionary of Literary Terms as cited in Barry, 2009 states that in deconstruction: “a text can be read as saying something quite different from what it appears to be saying … it may be read as carrying plurality or significance or as saying many different things which are fundamentally at variance with, contradictory to and subversive of what may be seen by criticism as a single stable meaning ”. It strengthens the idea that deconstructing a text may reveal new meaning that hides within a text. Moreover, the new meaning may oppose the previous meaning that can be seen as Cuddon suggests that “a text may betray itself”. Deconstruction makes the texts as “open-ended constructs” which are always dynamic. It means that the meaning in the text can only lead to countless other meanings Guerin, et al. 2011, p. 176, as described as follows: “deconstruction views texts as subversively undermining an apparent or surface meaning, and it denies any final explication or statement of meaning. It questions the presence of any objective structure or content in a text. Instead of alarm or dismay at their discoveries, the practitioners of deconstruction celebrate the text’s self-destruction, that inevitable seed of its own internal contradiction, as a never-ending free play of language” p. 176. Klarer 1999 also agrees that deconstruction leads to various meaning, but not final meaning by stating “the text does not remain the same after its reconstruction, since the analysis of signs and their re-organization in the interpretative process is like a continuation of the text itself” p. 89. Therefore, object of deconstruction is not like formalism, which seeks for the final meaning of a text as Kennedy and Gioia 2002 mention that formalist “demonstrates how the diverse elements of a text cohere into meaning” p. 655. Belsey 1990 in Critical Practice states that the object of deconstruction is “to examine the process of its production--not the private experience of the individual author, but the mode of production, the materials, and their arrangements in the work” p. 104. Kennedy and Gioia state that the object of deconstruc tion is “focusing on how language is used to achieve power, since they deconstructionists believe that there are no truths, only rival interpretations” p. 655. Those statements above strengthen the argument that the texts in deconstruction are open-ended and its object, as Guerin, et al. 2011 suggest, is to describe that “the text as always in the state of change, furnishing only provisional meanings” p. 176. Barry 2009 adds that the objective of deconstruction is “to show the disunity which underlies its apparent unity” p. 69. Considering its practice, deconstruction “practices what has been called textual harassment or oppositional reading, reading with the aim of unmasking internal contradictions or inconsistence in the text” Barry, 2009, p. 69. While, according to Guerin, et al. 2011, deconstruction practice is described as “taking apart any meaning to reveal contradictory structures hidden within” p. 177. However, Guerin, et al. add that “since there is no absolute truth, deconstructionists seek undermine all pretensions to authority, or power systems, in language” p. 176. Those statements reveal that deconstruction takes apart the text to reveal the hidden meaning underneath, but Culler 1997 argues that deconstruction “does not destroy” the text, but “gives it a different structure and functioning” p. 122. It is reasonable since text consists of words, which according to Kennedy and Gioia 2002 are “fundamentally unstable medium” and have “no fixed, single meaning” p. 655. In short, Barry 2009 concludes that deconstruction practice aims “to show that the text is at war with itself: it is a house divided, and disunified” p. 69. Deconstruction involves several steps in the practice. Barry 2009 notes that “deconstructionist looks for evidence of gaps, breaks, fissures and discontinuities of all kinds” p. 70. In order to achieve a better understanding, Barry adds that the deconstructionist seeks “contradictionparadoxes, shiftbreaks in tone, viewpoint, tense, time, person, attitude, conflicts, absencesomissions, linguistic quirks, aporia” to achieve its ultimate goal, which is “to show textual disunity” p. 70. Further, Barry 2009 provides several things that is crucial for deconstructionist to do as follows: a. Reading text against itself so as to expose what might be thought of as the ‘textual subconscious’, where meanings are expressed which may be directly contrary to the surface meaning p. 70. b. Fixing upon the surface features of the words- similarities in sound, the root meanings of words, a ‘dead’ or dying metaphor and bring these to the foreground, so that they become crucial to the overall meaning p. 70. c. Seeking to show that the text is characterized by disunity rather than unity p. 70. d. Concentrating on a single passage and analyze it so intensively that it becomes impossible to sustain a ‘univocal’ reading and the language explodes into ‘multiplicities of meaning’ p. 70.