Jacques Derrida: Breaking the Dome of Rigid Interpretation

Abstract

Jacques Derrida has been hailed as a precursor of introducing new way of reading and interpreting literature and literary theory. His works enable us to understand that nothing is decidable because many meanings can exist at one time. In traditional mode of reading, a reader believes that language is capable of expressing ideas without changing the meaning. But for Derrida, any language has not provided definite and stable meaning, therefore, only text is the source of meaning. His deconstructive reading subverts the idea that text has a fixed and unified meaning. Derrida’s writings influenced literary critics in American Universities and the members of Yale School including Paul de Man, Geoffrey Hartman, and J. Hillis Miller. They became prominent figures in the contemporary literary theory. The present paper is an attempt to study the ways of Derrida’s deconstructive strategy. Derrida is mainly concerned with the problematic nature of all stable centers. Everything in this world is based on the idea of a center which is a truth, origin and God word etc. which generates all meaning. The deconstructive approach of reading subverts the traditional mode of reading a text. After the arrival of this kind of reading, the critical theories in the past have become absolutely irrelevant.