Appleman Chapter 6

I found chapter 6 of Critical Encounters to be less exciting than many of the other chapters. First off, I felt that Appleman's example of an MTV music video - comparing it to a deconstructionist theory - to be a little bit of a stretch. I understand what she was going for, but I just don't think that it really worked as an analogy. Another thing that I didn't particularly like about this chapter was that the author reverted back to her chapter 1 style of letting other authors do the talking for her. There were too many lengthy quotations and not enough explanation. I understand that DT is a complicated one, and hard to define, but some of the definitions that she chose to include were contradictory, or, at the very least, uncomplimentary of one another. She admits this fact on page 106 when she says, "[p]erhaps, as with this chapter, the most difficult part of teaching deconstruction to adolescents is the attempt to define it." Indeed, even her definition on page 103 seems slightly ironic in that she says, "[e]ven those who are firmly convinced of the usefulness of other kinds of literary theory readily dismiss deconstruction as both frivolous and difficult." It seems to me that practitioners of other literary theories may admit to deconstructions difficulty, but would they really claim it to be "frivolous?" Is it even possible for something such as this theory to be both "difficult" and "frivolous" at the same time? Her examples and definitions of this literary theory are weak at best but there was one definition that she included in the chapter that worked a little better for me. Leggo's definition on page 101 says that "[a]ccording to deconstruction, a text is not a window a reader can look through in order to see either the author's intention or an essential truth, nor is the text a mirror that turns back a vivid image of the reader's experiences, emotions, and insights. Instead, deconstruction is a practice of reading that aims to make meaning from a text by focusing on how the text works rhetorically, and how a text is connected to other texts as well as the historical, cultural, social, and political contexts in which texts are written, read, published, reviewed, rewarded, and distributed." The very idea of deconstruction theory seems ironic to me. If deconstruction says that language is unstable and ambiguous, then can't we also say that the conclusions we come to by using this theory in practice are equally unstable and ambiguous?