ABSTRACT
The Yale School was an event that took place and that had wide-reaching consequences. Such schools or circles are the result of conscious planning or collaboration. They happen more or less contingently, accidentally, fortuitously. Frank Lentricchia, speaks of the Yale School as a kind of Mafia, with Paul de Man the capo di tutti capi, meeting secretly in some member's kitchen to plot collectively the overthrow of the Western tradition. The historical fact is that the five primary members of the Yale School, Harold Bloom, Geoffrey Hartman, Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, and author, never once met together in a bunch. The chapter suggests that the distinctions among the five original members of the Yale School were a matter of differing theoretical presuppositions. It finally explores about how the work of the Yale School members was to some degree institutionalized at Yale and then assimilated in universities and colleges in the United States and around the world.
