| Deconstruction is a school of philosophy that originated in France in the late 1960s. Ithas had an enormous impact on Anglo-American criticism. Jacques Derrida is the chiefproponent of deconstruction, and it is this deconstruction that upends the Westernmetaphysical tradition. It represents complex response to a variety of theoretical andphilosophical movements of the 20th century.Though many American critics had reservations about deconstructive ideas,deconstruction as a mode of inquiry found quick reception in the American academy. It wasreadily accepted and enlarged upon at Yale by such critics as Paul de Man, J. Hillis Miller,Geoffrey Hartman and Harold bloom. Among them Miller is a most prominent member of theYale "Gang of Four." He is perhaps best remembered for his defenses of deconstruction,which focus on brilliant deconstructive analyses of opposites and differences. Hisrepresentative book is Fiction and Repetition, and this book is the research on repetition. Itattracts my attention, and I evoked some critical thinking on his theory of repetition.My purpose in this paper is to find the deep relationship between the reader and the text,and this idea is edified by Miller's repetition theory and taken as the theoretical foundation ofmy thesis. First, I analyze the nature of the text by Miller's theory on repetition and find thatthe text has no central meaning and its meanings increase irregularly with the repetitions likea parabola with no ends because of the repetition in the text. I refer to two books as examples:Wuthering Heights and Frankenstein, and I prove my opinions in this research by therepetitions in these two books. Second, I do some research on the reader criticism and Freud'spsychological theory to study the reader's reading psychology, and I find that the nature of thereader is to find the focal point of the parabola, that is: the central meaning which determinesthe whole text, but the result is the focal point exists and does not exist at the same time, sowhat the reader does is unavailing. The natures of the reader and the text are contradictory toeach other, and they are heterogeneous. But on the other hand the reader and the text dependon each other to exist and they are symbiotic.The research intends to rebuild the relationship between the reader and the text, and offera new perspective for literary criticism. |
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