Deconstruction is a method of literary criticism which assumes that language refers only to itself rather than to an extratextual reality and which asserts multiple conflicting interpretations of a text and bases such interpretations on the philosophical, political or social implications. of the use of language in the text rather than on the author's intention.

Deconstruction was initiated by French critic Jacques Derrida, who in a series of books published beginning in the late 1960s, launched a major critique of traditional Western metaphysics. Derrida's deconstructive strategies, which expand on Ferdinand de Saussure's insistence on the arbitrariness of the verbal sign, have subsequently established themselves as an important part of postmodernism, especially in poststructural literary theory and text analysis.

Deconstruction begins with the assumptions that the world is unknowable and that language is unstable, elusive and unfaithful. Consequently, literary texts, which are made up of words, have no fixed, single meaning. Since they believe that literature cannot definitely express its subject matter, deconstructionists tend to shift their attention away from what is being said to how language is being used in a text.

Like formalist critics, deconstructionists try to find the meaning of a text by close reading. But while a formalist usually tries to demonstrate how the diverse elements of a text cohere with meaning and often holds that a competent author constructs a coherent work with a stable meaning and that competent readers can perceive this meaning, deconstructionists seek to show that a literary work (usually called "a text" or "a discourse") inevitably is self-contradictory and approach attempts to show how the text "deconstructs", that is, how it can be broken down into mutually irreconcilable positions.

Deconstructionists reject the notion that the critic should endorse the myth of authorial control over language. Deconstructionist critics like Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault have therefore called for "the death of the author", that is, the rejection of the assumption that the author can fully control the meaning of a text. They have also announced the death of literature as a special category of writing. In their view, poems and novels are merely words on a page; all texts are created equal-equally untrustworthy.

Deconstructionists focus' on how language is used to achieve power. Since they believe, in the words of critic David Lehman, that "there are no truths, only rival interpretations", deconstructionists try to understand how some "interpretations" come to be regarded as truth. Deconstruction ultimately questions the possibility -of arriving at absolute truth, challenges Western modes of thought, and exchanges interpretation and closure for "textuality" and "play". In essence, deconstruction refuses to let us feel satisfied with easy, totaling perceptions and interpretations.

Deconstruction may strike you as a negative, even destructive, critical approach, and yet by patient analysis, deconstructive critics often reveal fascinating aspects of the most familiar literary texts and expose the hidden limits of our interpretive systems-textual and otherwise.