When one speaks of the structure of a literary work one does so from a certain vantage point: one starts with notions of the meaning of effects of a poem and tries to identify the structures responsible for those effects. Possible configurations or patterns that makes not contribution are rejected as irrelevant. That is to say an intuitive understanding of the poem functions as the “centre” …is it both a starting point and a limiting principle. For this reasons, Derrida and his poststructuralist followers reject the very notion of “linguistic competence” introduced by Noam Chomsky, a structural linguist. The idea that there is a competent reading “gives a privileged status to a particular set of rules of reading,…granting preeminence to certain conventions and excluding from the realm of language all the truly creative and productive violations of those rules”(Culler, Structuralist Poetics 241)
Poststructuralist calls into question assumptions made about literature by formalist, as well as by structuralist, critics. Formalist or the New Criticism as it was once commonly called
Assumes a work of literature to be a freestanding, self-contained it's meaning found in the complex network of relations that constitute it's part (images, sounds, rhythms, allusions, and so on). To be sure, deconstruction is somewhat like formalism in several ways. Both the formalist and the deconstructor focus on the literary text; neither is likely to interpret a poem or a novel by relating it to events in the author's life, letters, historical period, or even culture. And formalists, long before deconstructors, discovered counterpatterns of meaning in the same text. Formalists find contradiction and undecidability.
Here, though the two groups part ways. Formalists believe a complete understanding of a literary work is possible, and understanding in which even the ambiguities will fulfill a definite, meaningful function. Poststructuralists celebrate the apparently limitless possibilities for the production of meaning that develop when the language of the critic enters that language of the text. Such a view is in direct opposition to the formalist view that a work of literary art has organic unity(therefore, structuralist would say, a “center”), if only we could find it.
Poststructuralists break with formalist, too, over an issue they have debated with structuralists. The issue involves metaphor and metonymy, two terms for different kinds of rhetorical tropes, or figures of speech. Metonymy refers to a figure that is chosen to stand for something that it is commonly associated witch, or with which it happens to be contiguous or juxtaposed. When said to a waitress, “I will eat the cold food you are serving today”. We refer to the food we want as a plate simply because plates are what foot happens to be served on and because everyone understands that by ”plate” we mean food. A metaphor, on the other hand, is a figure of speech that involves a special, intrinsic, nonarbitrary relationship with what it represents. When you say you are blue, if you believe that there is an intrinsic, timeless likeness between that color and melancholy feeling- a likeness that just doesn't exist between sadness and yellow- then you are using the word blue metaphorically.
Although both formalists and structuralists make much of the difference between metaphor and metonymy, Derrida, Miller and Paul de Man have contended with the distinction deconstructively. They have questioned not only the distinction but also, and perhaps especially, the privilege we grant to metaphor, which we tend to view as the positive and superior figure of speech. De Man, in Allegories of Reading , analyzes a passage from Proust's Swann's Way, arguing that it is about the nondistinction between metaphor and metonymy -and that it makes it's claim metonymically. In Fiction and Repetition: Seven English Novels (1982), Miller connects the belief in metaphorical correspondences with other metaphysical beliefs, such as those in origins , ending, transcendence, and underlying truths. Isn't it likely, deconstructors keep implicitly asking, that every metaphor was once a metonym, but that we have simply forgotten what arbitrary juxtaposition or contiguity gave rise to the association that now seems mysteriously special?
The hypothesis that what we call metaphors are really old metonyms may perhaps be made clearer by the following example. We used the word “Watergate” as a metonym to refer to a political scandal that began in the Watergate building complex. Recently, we have used part of the building's name (gate) to refer to a political scandals(Irangate). However, already there are people who use and “understand” these terms who are unaware that Watergate is the name of a building. In the future, isn't it possible that gate, which began as part of a simple metonym, will seem like perfect metaphor for scandal- a word that suggests corruption and wrongdoing with a strange and inexplicable rightness?