Discovered: Oct 16, 2025 15:28 (UTC)ME:: I need to dig deeper into Postmodern criticism, deconstruction, etc ; Brian Marick:: Deconstructing (cruddily) “How to Deconstruct Almost Everything” // Oddly Influenced

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In 1993, the software engineer Chip Morningstar published an essay called “How To Deconstruct Almost Anything.” In it, he surveys what he learned reading Jonathan Culler’s 1982 book On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism, which was a standard text at the time for people who want to do literary criticism.

Nowadays, he’d have had an easier time. I would recommend Peter Berry’s 1995 Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory or Lois Tyson’s 1998 Critical Theory Today: A User-Friendly Guide. Both are survey books, covering various different styles of criticism, including the New Criticism, structuralism, deconstruction (a rival of structuralism), New Historicism, and so on. Those are generally lumped together as “Theory,” not a great name in my opinion. Morningstar speaks of “postmodernism” and “deconstruction” rather interchangeably, which is wrong but unfortunately common. Postmodern criticism is a type of Theory that lives alongside deconstruction. You can think of Theory as the abstract superclass, and postmodernism and deconstruction as concrete subclasses. He’s got the inheritance hierarchy – and which properties belong to which class – all mixed up. It’s possibly also important that deconstruction and postmodernism were originally philosophical theories by actual philosophers that were later adopted by literary critics. Jacques Derrida the philosopher was doing the philosophy thing of being in dialogue with dead philosophers like Hegel, Heidegger, Nietzsche, and Husserl, and his key writings assume you’ve already read those people. (And Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger are notoriously opaque, even for philosophers.) Culler tries to explain both the philosophy and its application, which makes for a tough read.

The critic is like the programmer. You can use just one approach (like deconstruction, or like Rust) for all your projects, but you’re better off if you can choose the tool you think most appropriate for the job

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