A posteriori

DECONSTRUCTED: See discussion under deconstruction.

DECONSTRUCTION: An interpretive movement in literary theory that reached its apex in the 1970s. Deconstruction rejects absolute interpretations, stressing ambiguities and contradictions in literature. Deconstruction grew out of the linguistic principles of De Saussure who noted that many Indo-European languages create meaning by binary opposites. Verbal oppositions such as good/evil, light/dark, male/female, rise/fall, up/down, and high/low show a human tendency common transculturally to create vocabulary as pairs of opposites, with one of the two words arbitrarily given positive connotations and the other word arbitrarily given negative connotations. Deconstructionists carry this principle one step further by asserting that this tendency is endemic to all words, and hence all literature. For instance, they might try to complicate literary interpretations by revealing that "heroes" and "villains" often have overlapping traits, or else they have traits that only exist because of the presence of the other. Hence these concepts are unreliable in themselves as a basis for talking about literature in any meaningful way. Oftentimes, detractors of deconstruction argue that deconstructionists deny the value of literature, or assert that all literature is ultimately meaningless. It would be more accurate to assert that deconstructionists deny the absolute value of literature, and assert that all literature is ultimately incapable of offering a constructed meaning external to the "prison-house of language," which always embodies oppositional ideas within itself. Deconstruction is symptomatic in many ways of postmodernism. In the more radical fringes of postmodernism, postmodern artists, dramatists, poets, and writers seek to emphasize the conventions of story-telling (rather than hide these conventions behind verisimilitude) and break away from conventions like realism, cause-and-effect, and traditional plot in narratives. Such a text might be called "deconstructed" in a loose sense. See also différance.

DECORATED INITIAL: In medieval manuscripts, this term refers to an introductory letter of a text division, embellished with some type of abstract design, i.e., a design not necessarily containing a picture (which would make it an inhabited initial) and not necessarily containing a scene from the story (which would make it an historiated initial). Unlike the latter two types, the adornment in a decorated initial has no overt connection to the material discussed or narrated in the book's contents. Click here for an example from Dagulf's Psalter in order to view one. Cf. inhabited initial and historiated initial.

DECORUM: The requirement that individual characters, the characters' actions, and the style of speech should be matched to each other and to the genre in which they appear. This idea was of central importance to writers and literary critics from the time of the Renaissance up through the eighteenth century. Lowly characters, low actions, and low style, for instance, were thought necessary for satire. Epic literature, on the other hand, called for characters of high estate, engaging in great actions, and speaking using elevated, poetic diction.

DEDUCTION: The process of logic in which a thinker takes a rule for a large, general category and assumes that specific individual examples fitting within that general category obey the same rule. For instance, a general rule might be that "Objects made of iron rust." When the logician then encounters a shovel made of iron, he can assume deductively that the shovel made of iron will also rust just as other iron objects do. This process is the opposite of induction. Induction fashions a large, general rule from a specific example. Deduction determines the truth about specific examples using a large general rule. Deductive thinking is also called syllogistic thinking. See induction, logic, and logical fallacies, and the class's syllogism handouts.

DEEP STRUCTURE: In Noam Chomsky's transformational grammar, the biological "hardwiring" in the brain that gives children the capacity to use language, as opposed to the surface structure, i.e., the incidentals of the language children actually learn.

DEFAMILIARIZATION: The literary theoretical term "defamiliarization" is an English translation for Viktor Shklovsky's Russian term ostranenie. Shklovsky coined the phrase in 1917 in his essay "Art as Technique." In this artistic technique, a writer, poet, or painter takes common, everyday, or familiar objects and forces the audience to see them in an unfamiliar way or from a strange perspective. It is especially common in satire, Dadaism, postmodernism, and science fiction. Although Shklovsky coined this term to mark a distinction between poetic language and practical, communicative language, he and later critics argued it applied to all effective art, which ideally would force the viewer/reader to perceive the subject in a new way.

DEISM (From Latin Deus, "God"): An intellectual religious movement en vogue through the late seventeenth century up to the late eighteenth century concerned with rational rather than faith-based approaches to religion and understanding God. The movement is often associated with the Enlightenment movement, Neoclassicism, and Free Masonry. In general, Deists prided themselves on free-thinking and logic and tended to reject any specific dogma, so it is difficult to define the beliefs of an individual Deist without referring to generalities. Deists were heavily influenced by John Locke's mechanistic philosophy and Newtonian physics, seeing the universe as a place ruled rationally by cause and effect. They tended to see God as an impersonal but intelligent force, a first cause that created the universe and set it in motion, who then allowed life and matter to proceed on its own without further need for divine intervention. The logic is that, if God is infallible, omniscient and omnipotent, logically he would pre-establish his design in the world in such a way that he would not need to tinker constantly with it or adjust it through supernatural intervention. (Such activity indicates an error, a change of mind, indecision, or some other sign of imperfection on God's part.)

This divine being was thought to be completely transcendent--separate from the creation rather than contained within it. Deistic writings often refer to the Deity using metaphors of the architect, the watchmaker, the mason, or some other skilled worker who measures out the universe with geometric and mechanical precision. Thus, a common Deist metaphor compares the universe to a perfectly designed watch or clock--a construct created with complex gears and moving parts, then wound up, and finally released since it can operate on its own without any more effort on the creator's part. Deists rejected the belief that an infallible creator would need to intervene via miracles and individual revelation. Generally, Deism rejected trinitarian doctrine in favor of seeing God as a unified, singular entity. They usually viewed Christ as a holy and wise man, but discounted the idea of him performing miracles or being a literal son of God. To distinguish between the Deistic idea of monotheism and that espoused by traditional, dogmatic religions, they usually referred to the Godhead as "the Deity" or "the Creator" (as opposed to conventional labels "God," or "Jehovah" or "Christ"). They tended to see the divine as impersonal, as removed from humanity and unmoved by prayers, sacrifices, or other acts of spiritual bribery. They thought the rational and structured nature of the divine was better seen in the perfect orbits of planets and the precision of geometry and the predictable harmonies of mathematics, rather than in prayer, sermons, speaking in tongues, or other irrational displays of extra-normal reality. They thought that God was best worshipped by good works, effective charity, and harmonious interaction with one's fellow humans rather than by empty religious ritual, church attendance, or financial support of some "priestly caste," as one Deist wrote.

Examples of Enlightenment figures influenced by Deism include Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin, Voltaire, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, John Toland, Antony Cooper, Thomas Wooston, Matthew Tindal, Peter Annet, and others. The case of Thomas Jefferson is particularly of interest, given his editing of the "Jefferson Bible"--a harmonized edition of the four gospels blended into one text, but one in which Jefferson systematically deletes all references to Christ's miracles and the supernatural, focusing only on moral precepts and eradicating what Jefferson calls "enthusiasms" and "superstitions." Copies can be purchased from online bookstores under the title The Morals of Jesus of Nazareth, for students interested in tracing Deist thought.