Textuality’s radical claim turns all discourse into literature, deflating and aggrandizing it at once
Evidence
In an accompanying move, ‘Literature’ undergoes both a deflation and an aggrandizement: it becomes, in one sort of reading, just one discourse among other discourses, with its specialness residing simply in the difference of its language; but in a much more radical and now quite pervasive displacement – which asserts that there is really nothing outside language, outside textuality, outside representation – everything becomes, in a sense, ‘Literature’. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 90
Categorization
- DEFINE: Clarifies the double movement by which deconstruction simultaneously deflates literature to one discourse and inflates it to encompass all reality.
Related
- Every text is built from absorbed and transformed prior texts. (similarity 0.82)
- Postmodernism replaces the autonomous work with the decentered text (similarity 0.79)
- Deconstruction’s rise marked literary criticism’s transition into literary theory. (similarity 0.79)
- Every text inevitably conveys meanings its author neither intended nor controlled. (similarity 0.79)
- Texts shape the reality they claim merely to describe (similarity 0.79)