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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Doug McCrae" data-source="post: 8321885" data-attributes="member: 21169">I had a look at the section on deconstruction in Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory 2e (1996), and I don’t think it applies to anything I’ve written in this thread.Certain meanings are elevated by social ideologies to a privileged position, or made the centres around which other meanings are forced to turn. Consider, in our own society, Freedom, the Family, Democracy, Independence, Authority, Order and so on… If you examine such first principles closely, you can see that they may always be 'deconstructed': they can be shown to be products of a particular system of meaning, rather than what props it up from the outside. First principles of this kind are commonly defined by what they exclude: they are part of the sort of 'binary opposition' beloved of structuralism. Thus, for male-dominated society, man is the founding principle and woman the excluded opposite of this; and as long as such a distinction is tightly held in place the whole system can function effectively. 'Deconstruction' is the name given to the critical operation by which such oppositions can be partly undermined, or by which they can be shown partly to undermine each other in the process of textual meaning… Deconstruction, that is to say, has grasped the point that the binary oppositions with which classical structuralism tends to work represent a way of seeing typical of ideologies. Ideologies like to draw rigid boundaries between what is acceptable and what is not, between self and non-self, truth and falsity, sense and nonsense, reason and madness, central and marginal, surface and depth. Such metaphysical thinking, as I have said, cannot be simply eluded: we cannot catapult ourselves beyond this binary habit of thought into an ultra-metaphysical realm. But by a certain way of operating upon texts - whether 'literary' or 'philosophical' - we may begin to unravel these oppositions a little, demonstrate how one term of an antithesis secretly inheres within the other… Deconstruction tries to show how such oppositions, in order to hold themselves in place, are sometimes betrayed into inverting or collapsing themselves, or need to banish to the text's margins certain niggling details which can be made to return and plague them. Derrida's own typical habit of reading is to seize on some apparently peripheral fragment in the work — a footnote, a recurrent minor term or image, a casual allusion - and work it tenaciously through to the point where it threatens to dismantle the oppositions which govern the text as a whole.D&D does prominently present "binary oppositions", such as Good and Evil, demihumans and humanoids, or civilisation and wilderness. But I haven’t been trying to "demonstrate how one term of an antithesis secretly inheres within the other", with the aim of denying the existence of a higher source of meaning. I haven't been looking at the "text's margins" or a "peripheral fragment" – evil humanoids, particularly orcs, are probably the most important monsters in D&D. Tolkien, Howard, Lovecraft, and Burroughs are influential Appendix N authors.I think I’ve been doing exactly what [USER=42582]@pemerton[/USER] describes – demonstrating influences and parallels between texts.</blockquote>

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