Emily Dickenson and Deconstructionism

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Emily Dickenson is notorious for her exceedingly extraordinary style of poetry. Unlike many of her contemporaries, she did not concentrate on conventional punctuation or word meanings, but rather focused on the school of thought known as deconstructionism. It is the natural progression from structuralism, where the writer takes a piece out of all historical, social, and political contexts in order to further examine the true meaning of a piece. Deconstruction is the paring down of the written word to its simplest form, consisting of just lines on the page and leaving the meaning open to the reader’s interpretation. This ideology of writing is an attempt to establish a secure or ultimate meaning of a text. Generally, when reading poetry, one does not try to find the purest form of a word. There is always an obvious meaning to the poem on the surface, when each word is taken at face value. So, the superficial meaning of the poem does not change drastically from read to read. However, in each poem there are always several layers of meaning that exist for all readers to discover. All that is necessary is a desire to explore deeper into the poem. Emily Dickenson was a scientist of sorts in that she never stopped exploring or stripping things to their bare essentials. This desire for understanding continued into her poetry as she drove past the external meanings of words and into their veiled subconscious. When reading a poem in terms of the deconstruction ideas, there are always several layers of meaning for each individual word and for the punctuation or lack-there-of as it was in Emily’s case. There are also obvious meanings that change with each reading depending on punctuation and line breaks. In Emily’s poems there is a notable lack of punctuations and an overuse of dashes, which she is now famous for, that helps place more emphasis on how the poem

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