WARNING: nerdiness below

Currently, I'm re-reading a textbook that one of my favorite professors wrote for a course I took last fall. This guy is just an AWESOME teacher. The book is called How to Interpret Literature: Critical Theory for Literary and Cultural Studies, and isn't even half as boring as it sounds. I dare say it's funny in places. I really like the way that he almost neurotically covers a point so as to minimize reader confusion. For example,

"People who misunderstand deconstruction often think that it says there is no meaning... On the contrary, and most characteristically, deconstruction actually multiplies meaning. In a related misconception, people who know little about deconstruction often suppose that it simply means destruction. But deconstruction is not destruction. It can change the way we view things, but it does not destroy anything. It offers more, not less. In deconstruction, there is always more, a surplus of meaning and rhetoric that Derrida calls a supplement... This is not important, but people who know hardly anything about deconstruction say "deconstructionism" or "deconstructionalism." Perhaps they are thinking of analogies to words like "stucturalism." The usual terms are deconstruction, deconstructionist, and deconstructive... Though many deconstructionists, and occasionally even Derrida, use the verb deconstruct (and it has even entered the popular talk of the general public), I think that using the verb deconstruct and referring to deconstruction as an action misses a key point. Since deconstruction refers to a basic principle of all language, we cannot really deconstruct something. If critics want to think deconstructively, then, instead of deconstructing a text, they find the way that it is always already deconstructed. They don't do it to a text. Instead they expose the way that it is already done, the way that a text has always already deconstructed itself." (78-80)

I can't help wondering what he would have to say about this email that arrived in my inbox this morning.

I think the idea is that the meaning of denim is always already multiple: bootcut, skinny jeans, wide leg, jean skirts, etc. I mean, it definitely looks like the models are thinking deeply about différance, or something.

And because I seriously can't get enough of this guy's writing style, here's a little snippet from his chapter on stucturalism.

"I like to give examples and see if my students can tell which are metaphors and which are metonymies. I might pick out a student and say that, in our class discussions, she is a real spark plug. That is a metaphor, because this student is not connected to or part of an engine... But what if my student is a robot? Then "spark plug" turns into a metonymy...

[Then he discusses how structuralists might have exaggerated the usefulness of understanding the distinction between metaphor and metonymy, but that it can sometimes be useful. He ends the discussion with:]

(And for better or worse, referring to metonymies will allow us to describe what we notice in a cool and sophsticated sounding way.)"