Every theory has its pet names. What does Deconstruction think of literature, authors, and readers?
What is literature?
Believe it or not, deconstructionists find this question super straightforward to answer. You can thank Derrida; he left us a trail of reflections on what he called "the institution of literature."
Deconstruction values literature because it is, in one critic's helpful paraphrase, "an institution in which the value of deferral is embraced." In other words, literature is one place in Western culture where it's okay to suspend certainties. Where you can put truth on "pause" in order to revel in play (in the Derridean sense).
Not sure what a literary text is? That's alright, deconstruction says. You're really not supposed to. In fact, what literature teaches is precisely the ability to dwell in uncertainty.
This means that books don't just provide a time-out from totalizing ideas, institutions, and experiences. They actually provide crucial training for being properly skeptical in all of our ethical and political endeavors.
Oh, and there's one last crucial point about deconstruction's relationship to literature. Always style-obsessed as well as suspicious of binaries, Derrida refuses the neat opposition between philosophy and literature.
He thinks philosophy is always borrowing from literature, and (good) literature always leads us to philosophical insight. This is why he lavishes the same kind of care on close readings of Kant as on analyses of Kafka.
Carry on my wayward Derrideans. There may never be peace, but there will be play, when you are done.
What is an author?
Deconstruction doesn't care much for the authority of capital-A Authors, but it does give more attention to biography than you might at first expect it to.
Derrida noted that "traditional philosophy excludes biography," but considered himself "among those few people who (and you must do it well) put philosophers' biographies back in the picture." (See Derrida: A Biography 1.)
If this was true of philosophers, then it was true of the authors of literary texts, who were never quite as "dead" for Derrida as they were for, say, Barthes. But remember that literature and philosophy aren't strictly separable from deconstruction's point of view. So the author is also a philosopher; and the philosopher, an author.
What is a reader?
To deconstructionists, a reader is the player of a game. But this game's rules aren't determined in advance. Instead, everything is left up to the reader to discover—or, really, to improvise—as she goes along.
Derrida sometimes calls these rules the "protocols" of the text.
From another angle, deconstruction's reader is a risk-taker. If other theories train their students to approach a text as if they were fishing for confirmation of the theories' tenets, deconstruction instead encourages readers to remain open to the possibility of refutation.
That is, Derrida and Co. want readers to be willing to change their minds. To overturn their assumptions. You know, including the assumptions they've learned from deconstruction itself. Pretty rad, right?
For more on the reader in deconstruction, check out the passage from Derrida's "Plato's Pharmacy" and the mission statement from Barbara Johnson, both quoted in our "Say What?" Section.