“READ IT IF YOU CAN”: DECONSTRUCTIONIST AND POSTSTRUCTURALIST READINGS OF HERMAN MELVILLE’S WRITINGS
“READ IT IF YOU CAN”: DECONSTRUCTIONIST AND POSTSTRUCTURALIST READINGS OF HERMAN MELVILLE’S WRITINGS

Summary/Abstract: The current paper highlights a number of landmarks in the exegesis of Herman Melville’s fiction undertaken from the perspective of deconstructive and poststructuralist criticism. Deconstructive readings of Melville are meant to bring to light the limits of what is possible for literary criticism to accomplish just as deconstruction reveals the limits of what is possible for human thought to accomplish. The deconstructionists hailed Melville as an unparalleled master of aporia and indeterminacy which he handled with intellectual ease - a quality which singled him out, distancing him from his unsophisticated contemporaries. The notions of de-centering, displacement, secondariness, the turning of reference into self-reference, defining for any deconstructive practice are employed in the exploration of the American author’s writing with a view to foregrounding the idea that the metaphysical and epistemological questions in his work become mere linguistic questions, reality being generated by the free interplay of signifiers.

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