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[...] Derrida is clearly out to do more than develop new techniques of reading: deconstruction is for him an ultimately political practice, an attempt to dismantle the logic by which a particular system of thought, and behind that a whole system of political structures and social institutions, ma…

[...] All literary texts are woven out of other literary texts, not in the conventional sense that they bear the traces of 'influence' but in the more radical sense that every word, phrase or segment is a reworking of other writings which precede or surround the individual work. There is no such th…

The early structuralist Barthes still trusts to the possibility of a 'science' of literature [...] Such a scientific criticism would in some sense aim to know its object 'as it really was'; but does this not run counter to Barthes' hostility to the neutral sign? The critic, after all, has to use la…

[...] there is something in writing itself which finally evades all systems and logics. There is a continual flickering, spilling and defusing of meaning--what Derrida calls 'dissemination'--which cannot be easily contained with the categories of the text's structure, or within the categories of …

[...] Having characterized the underlying rule-systems of a literary text, all the structuralist could do was sit back and wonder what to do next. There was no question of relating the work to the realities of which it treated, or to the conditions which produced it, or to the actual readers who st…