ABSTRACT
As Harold Bloom puts it in the opening essay of the Yale School’s non-manifesto, Deconstruction and Criticism-. ‘Reading well is not necessarily a polite process ... Only the capacity to wound gives a healing capacity the chance to endure, and so to be heard.’ 1 I hope, therefore, that my hosts will understand the spirit in which I will use them as the starting point for the depiction of a much larger configuration, and that by the end of this paper I will not have bitten off more of the hand that feeds me than I can chew.
