Feminist film critics argue that the apparatus of the cinema extends and intensifies an enduring tradition in Western art, a tradition which the art historian
John Berger sums up in his famous dictum: “Men act and women appear.” These conventions of looking in film, which give activity to male characters and
passivity to female characters, are replicated on the level of a film’s plot. Male characters are traditionally the heroes, the doers, the rescuers, or even the
psychotic killers, whereas the women are traditionally the hero’s reward, the rescue or the victim.
13
D. Deconstructive Criticism
Deconstruction is unthinkable without post-structuralism. Many of the writers associated with post-structuralism
14
are considered to have practiced deconstruction.
15
The same presuppositions are shared by both approaches. The purpose of the present section is to out line the specific characteristic of a
deconstruction approaches to literary analysis. The nation of deconstruction is indissolubly linked to the named by Jacques Derrida.
Deconstruction who described by Jacques Derrida is aim to show inappropriate of logic or rhetoric between explicitly was mentioned and implicitly
hidden by text. Ferdinand de Sassure had explicitly made verbal language priority to written one.
13
. Ibid. p. 212.
14
Poststructuralism is the name for a movement in philosophy that began in the 1960s. It remains an influence not only in philosophy, but also in a wider set of subjects, including
literature, politics,
art, cultural
criticisms, history
and sociology.
www.readysteadybook.comarticle.Aspx?...whatispoststructuralism. Accessed on Jan 19
th
2011, 20:03 pm.
15
David Carter, Literary Theory, Great Britain: Pocket Essentials, 2006, p. 109.
Language and writing are two distinct systems of signs; the second exists for the sole purpose of representing the first. The linguistic object is not
both the written and the spoken forms of words; the spoken forms alone constitute the object. But the spoken word is so intimately bound to its
written image that the latter manages to usurp the main role. People attach even more importance to the written image of a vocal sign than to the sign
itself. A similar mistake would be in thinking that the more can be learned about someone by looking at his photograph than by viewing him directly
de Sassure: 24.
16
Deconstruction is a philosophy applied to literary criticism, as well as to criticism of the other arts, which began to gain popularity in the 1980s. The field
of deconstruction arose partially in reaction to the literary theories of structuralism. Structuralism
17
posited that when words could be understood within the context of a society of readers, then one could point to the specific meaning of
a text.
18
Structuralism is an ideology of substances, that us the structure itself. Structural method was found by Sassure when he research language. Thus,
structuralism is identical with language. If the language seen in structural, it is assumed that language exist because the system of differences, and the essences
of this system is binary opposition. It refers to two mutually exclusive terms such signifiersignified, speechwriting, langueparole. The concept is one of
underlying tenets of structuralism. Deconstruction criticism basically is a critique of structuralism.
16
Melani Budianta 2002, op.cit. 44.
17
Structuralism is a method of analyzing phenomena, as in anthropology, linguistic, psychology or literature, chiefly characterized by contrasing the elemental structures of the
phenomena in
a system
of binary
opposition. http:www.answers.comtopicstructuralismixzz1BUDWnIBz. Accessed on Jan 19
th
2011, 20:10 pm.
18
What is deconstruction? http:www.wisegeek.comwhat-is-deconstruction.htm, Accessed on Dec 28
th
2010, 10:49 am
Deconstruction is an approach, which rigorously pursues the meaning of a text to the point of exposing the supposed contradictions and internal oppositions
upon which it is founded - showing that those foundations are irreducibly complex, unstable, or impossible. Derrida shows that a text can be read as saying
quite different from what it appears to be saying, and that it may be reads as carrying of significance or as saying many different things which are fundamental
at variance with, contradictory to and subversive of what maybe seen by criticism as a single, stable ‘meaning’. Thus, a text may betray itself. Texts create only a
semblance of stable meaning. Where a text may appear to offer the reader options eitheror, in fact, it offers not such choice bothand, and remains ultimately
uncommitted, leaving the reader with no sense of closure.
19
The kind of options which text offers will often be in the form of apparent binary oppositions which
the text seems to distinguish. In feminist theory which based on Sassure concept “signifier and signified”
meaning was produced by a different system. Correlates with this, we only know the meaning of the word ‘woman’ by virtue of its contrast with the word ‘man’.
Related to this opposition between ‘man and woman’, deconstruction critic argues that meaning is not oppositional in the way structuralisms assume. The feminism
critics borrow deconstruction techniques to integrate the phollocentrism tendency in texts, discussing it, reversing it or finding out the alternative surpassing
dichotomy
20
thinking approaches.
19
David Carter, op.cit, p. 111.
20
A dichotomy is a split into to part which is considered to be either contradictory or mutually exclusive. www.wisegeek.comwhat-is-a-dichotomy.htm. Accessed on Jan 19 2011,
20:14 pm
