Answering the Right Questions: Applicable Theory

What is a text?
In short, EVERYTHING is "Text"


DERRIDA/Deconstruction

"There is nothing outside of the text."


This phrase occurs at Derrida, Grammatology, p. 158. In its context it has a more specific and complicated sense than that usually attached to it by hostile commentators. 


Deconstruction in a nutshell: a conversation with Jacques Derrida.

From Ms. Smiths interview with Jacques Derrida. This is his response to: "what is deconstruction?"
"It is impossible to respond," Mr. Derrida said. "I can only do something which will leave me unsatisfied." But after some prodding, he gave it a try anyway. "I often describe deconstruction as something which happens. It's not purely linguistic, involving text or books. You can deconstruct gestures, choreography. That's why I enlarged the concept of text."
Mr. Derrida did not seem angry at having to define his philosophy at all; he was even smiling. "Everything is a text; this is a text," he said, waving his arm at the diners around him in the bland suburbanlike restaurant, blithely picking at their lunches, completely unaware that they were being "deconstructed." 

(Not a Hegelian dialectic with binary oppositions eventually leading to a synthesis)

What is a discourse?
FOUCAULT/ Cultural Discourse *(Anlysis)

"Cultural discourses, a notion that owes its genesis to the work of Michel Foucault, are culturally shared ways of thinking, doing, making, evaluating, and speaking" (Kiesling, 695).  Alfred Corn's "Sugar Cane" partakes in cultural and social discourses of religion, art, language, age, race, history, ethics, and economy.
"... discourses are similar to ideologies in that they describe unquestioned background assumptions that people of a culture share. However, discourses are more than ideology, even though they encompass it; discourses include social practices, artifacts, processes, and even desires. Most importantly, they are not controlled by one person or group but instead arise through the social practices, talk, thoughts, and desires of the people using them. They are therefore ever-changing and, most importantly, contestable'."  (Kiesling, 695)