Deconstruction and Pluralist Discourse: An Analysis of Nawal El Saadawi's Novels: Woman at Point Zero and God Dies by the Ni le
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Date
2007-03
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Addis Ababa University
Abstract
The production and the interpretation or evalua tion of literary works
hav ~ been going on hand in hand for a long time. As literary texts are
commonly believed to reflect the realities of life and endorse a belief or
some ultimate truth which pertain to man's language, thoughts and
experiences, critics are a lso widely accepted as people whose goal is to
explain the meanings embodied in literary works through employing
different approaches or theories. But meaning has become a very
controversial issue . Recent approaches, like deconstructive criticism
claim that all texts of all ages a re aphoris tic, undecidable, unreadable
and deconstruct themse lves. Accordingly, deconstructionists aim to show
that any literary p iece unavoidably undermines its own claim to have a
single and definite meaning. This mode of criticism argues that literary
texts which a re establis hed as feminist ones a lso undermine and
contradict their own views and proj ects . It states that since such texts
cannot be out of word play, there is no fixed center and constant man
over woman binary opposition.
This research, therefore, intends to examine the relationship between the
underlying principles of deconstructive criticism and feminist thought of
literary products with reference to the texts in focus . It mainly aims at
exploring the plurality of discourse and the tentativeness, contradiction
and plurality of meanings of the texts. However, in doing this , the study
will not t ry to decon struct the texts, it ra ther attempts to show how the
texts deconstruct themselves.
The thesis is divided into fou r chapters. The introductory chapter
justifies the necessi'ty of conducting the research and articulates the
overall content of the thesis. Cha pter two is literature review in which the
general theore tical framework of the study is es tablished: Mainly, it
discuses how developmen ts of critical theories have contributed to the
birth of deconstructive criticism. In addition, Issues related to
deconstruction, feminism, pluralism and discourse are discussed.
Following the litera ture review, interpretation and analysis of Woman at
Point Zero and God Dies by the Nile has been made in line with the major
a rguments of deconstructive criticism. To be sure that the novels'
ideological projects have been identified and not just set U;:J an easy
target, it has been attempted to provide all the evidences the novels offer
in support of the themes identified. Then, a close examination has been
ma de to find ou t the competing n a ture of the overt major ideologies or
themes of the texts . This has been done through discourse analysis . As
the explication has been u ndertaken based on textu al evidences, this
part sets the ground to the concluding remarks of the research. The last
cha p ter sums up the whole argument and draws conclusions based on
the major issues discussed. The findings of the research are a lso briefly
pointed out in this section .
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Keywords
Pluralist Discourse