Literature Quotes:
"I dream of you, to wake: would that I might Dream of you and not wake but slumber on; Nor find with dreams the dear companion gone, As, Summer ended, Summer birds take flight."	Monna Innominata by Christina Rossetti
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A post structualist (or deconstruction) study is basically interested in the semiotic of language. They are insterested not only in literary text but any format that communicates any meaning (back of a box of cereal, for example) and this is why they are often refered as the sausage machine critics. They do not care about anything outside the medium.
Intrinsic study

signifier=Sign
signified

ex: crib (signifier -bed(signified)
bed (signifier- where one sleeps, bed of flowers...(signified)

we are always working out what something means by what it doesn't mean.

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For example in studying a story such critics will look at the time line of the plot (t) which is the horizontal axis. At a significant point on the horizontal axis ie. the climax lets say they will stop and draw a vertical line for every other possibility.
For example, in the story Babylon Revisited by Fitzgerald, a decontrustionist would look at the fact that the main character's daughter is only important because she is not boy (yeah this not feminism) because a boy can signify independance, maturity and autonomy while a daughter represent fragility in the fact that her dad (main character) should be taking care of her instead of being an alcoholic. The daughter (Honoria) is used to emphasize his problem, to make the reader unsympatetic towards the main characters actions, to make the reader react. If she were a boy this would not be happening and the character would thus be useless. ---paradigm shift

Jacque Derrida
Sees language as philosophy
He wants to take apart first principles

Supplement
Speech is the thing and writing the supplement
Which makes speech the superior in binary opposition
You need both oppositions to understand either.

Roland Barthes
Was a structualist and discovered problems so he moves into post-structualism
Nothing is a founding principle
Message of signification=literature
Signification = the process to which we give meaning
Semiotics (literary critic)- second order language (discussion of the text) = metalanguage
First order of object language (text)

Infinite regress: by realizing that the metalangue can be put into the place of the first language. (APORIA)