UITSTEL VAN BETEKENIS

Abstract

Summary This study describes the reception of J. Derrida's language philosophy by the American literary sciences, especially J. Hillis Miller and Paul de Man. A number of central literary categories are investigated: the concepts of plot, metaphor and metonymy, and the reader understood as a ‘self’. The study shows how these literary realities must be seen in the context of the deconstruction project. It also shows the importance of the deconstruction project for the evaluation of the way in which (narrative) texts are manipulated by the actual readers. In fact the study deals with the textuality of language: the plot which is seen as a multiplicity of story lines which can be arbitrarily constructed; the metaphor described as sucked empty by the metonymic force of language; the self understood as a linguistic structure which transfers the text, as it is read via codes, to a different linguistic intervention. The study is written from an exegetical-theological practice. Therefore, it again and again raise...