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“Maybe a story is better without any hero.” –From an early draft of The Sun Also Rises D espite its increasing currency in literary debate, the term “deconstruction” still prompts in many readers a sense of apprehension and unease. Partly it is a matter of critical language: Much deconstructive criticism turns, like the term itself, on neologisms designed to address new critical concerns in new ways. The unversed reader, like a tourist in a foreign land, longs for a familiar idiom or at least a phrasebook. Partly it is a matter of critical stance: The deconstructive critic often posits different relationships between critic and text, between writer and reader, from those presumed and explored by previous criticism. Nevertheless, and as Barbara Johnson has recently argued, the basic principles motivating the deconstructive enterprise are not radically different from those implicit in other types of criticism. As is suggested by the etymological root of the term itself, the primary task of criticism – from the Greek verb krinein , meaning to separate or choose – is to differentiate. According to Johnson, “The critic not only seeks to establish standards for evaluating the differences between texts, but also tries to preceive something uniquely different within each text he reads and in so doing to establish his own individual difference from other critics.” The deconstructive critic fully acknowledges the subjective aspect of reading a text (or writing one, for that matter), and, instead of attempting to make a particular reading seem somehow universal, emphasizes the value of individuality, plurality, subjectivity, and particularity in all responses to texts and in texts themselves. Instead of trying to resolve differences (of responses, perspectives, parts, whatever), the deconstructive critic attempts to exploit them.
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