Significance of the Deconstructive Turn in Literature: Breaking of Logos in “The Second Coming” by W.B. Yeats

Abstract

Throughout the history of literary criticism, there have been constant shifts in levels of analysis of the texts. These levels may be literal, metaphorical, authoritative or superficial. The most primitive of the aesthetic theories, the mimetic theory, considered art as the imitation of the aspects of the universe. Around the sixteenth century, the focus was shifted to what effect art has on its audience, then to the artist in the seventeenth century, and finally to the work of art itself around the twentieth century. The advent of post-structuralism in the 1960s was an attack on structuralism’s constant search for an order, a structure, in novels, music, poetry, or visual texts. It is always assumed that a text yields meaning and significance once we untie its ‘core’ elements. Poststructuralists like Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida gave way to a new school of thought that believed in the ‘openness’ of texts, the role of text in the production of meaning and its relation to other texts. This paper focuses on the deconstructive turn and its significance in literature. We shall be doing a reading of William Butler Yeats’s “The Second Coming” and try to prove the poem as breaking the Derridean “logos”.