Deconstruction running amok!

Came across this facebook post I did about a year ago, well before I began the blog here. It's about one of the deconstructive postcolonial articles*** in the special issue done by Modern Fiction Studies back in 2004 or so. I was amused:

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Oh, bother. I'm reading a postcolonial/deconstructive critique of LOTR, and I came across this sentence: "Thus, any critical 'naming' of Tolkien's work that this analysis may arrive at, if such a naming is indeed possible, will be double-voiced, traced with echoes, shadows, and split subjects."

 Translation: "Read through the next 20 pages, and I double-dog dare you to find one single assertion in the whole piece. Seriously, just one proposition -- I'll give you a million dollars. If this entire article doesn't waste your life, then I've wasted my time in stringing together all these unrelated words and sentences."

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The rest of the article actually turned out decently -- but only because the author didn't hold true to these initial qualifiying statements and actually came out with pretty clear position.


*** For the sake of the morbidly curious, the article is:
Battis, Jes. "Gazing upon Sauron: Hobbits, Elves, and the Queering of the Postcolonial Optic." J.R.R. Tolkien. Spec. issue of Modern Fiction Studies 50.4 (2004): 908-926. Web. Academic Search Premier. 22 May 2015.

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