Volume 36, Number 18 · November 23, 1989
A Dictionary for Deconstructors
By Alison Lurie
Innovations in language are always interesting metaphorically. When the words used for familiar things change, or new words are introduced, they are usually not composed of nonsense syllables, but borrowed or adapted from stock. Assuming new roles, they drag their old meanings along behind them like flickering shadows. To the outside observer this seems especially true of the language of the contemporary school of literary criticism that now prefers to describe itself simply and rather magisterially as 'theory' but is still popularly referred to as post-structuralism or deconstruction.[1]
Feature, 2016 words
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