Deconstructionism is the result of the progressive evolution of the three following literary approaches, and if we dare to step further, we could say that some of the basic essence of each one of them has remained within Deconstruction up until now. To say the truth, as we will see in a few lines down, Deconstruction is a direct heir to Poststructuralism.

 STRUCTURALISM began with the linguistic work of Ferdinand de Saussure around the turn of the century: according to Saussure, we distinguish words not by what they are, but by how they differ from one another. So, while there are many possible ways to pronounce "cat," for instance, each one ever so slightly different from the others, we still recognize it as the word "cat" because it's not "cap," or "bat," or "cot." We recognize a word only because it differs from similar words. This notion of deriving identity from difference is the central theme of structuralism, which has been applied not only to linguistics, but anthropology, sociology, and literature. In all of them, the common thread is that meaning arises from the system of differences within a structure: north has no meaning without south, big has no meaning without small. Beginning in the 1960s, structuralism came under assault from poststructuralists, who adopted many of the premises and techniques of structuralism but arrived at very different conclusions.

 The NEW CRITICS were a group -- never a formal school -- of critics, mostly in America (and sometimes in England), who flourished from the 1930s through the 1960s. The center of their program was close reading, the painstaking attention to the verbal features of a poem. They were called "new" because they rejected what they saw as the excesses of earlier critics, who devoted more attention to historical background and authors' biographies than they did to the words in front of them. Some of the central principles of the New Critics were the Intentional Fallacy, Affective Fallacy, and the Heresy of Paraphrase. The New Critics have become the whipping boys of later, more theoretical critics, although the best New Critics were never really the straw men their later opponents made them out to be. In fact, many of the New Critics were remarkably theoretical in their own way.

 By the 1960s, literary theorists, linguists, and philosophers frustrated with some of the limitations of structuralism began to develop some radical critiques of some basic structuralist ideas. The results of their new thought are known as poststructuralism. Structuralists argue that meaning is dependent on the relationship between the various parts of a structure -- meaning arises from their difference. But if meaning comes only from difference, ask the poststructuralists, how can we pin it down? How can we grasp the whole structure? The most famous and influential variety of poststructural thoughts is deconstruction, developed by Jacques Derrida. Poststructuralism also informs and interacts with postmodernism.