ABSTRACT
I Deconstruction has been seen by some of its opponents as a mere continuation of the ‘old’ New Criticism by more sophisticated technical means. Both movements, it is argued, arose from a narrow preoccupation with ‘the text’ which effectively cuts criticism off from a sense of its larger (intellectual and social) obligations. In each case the appeal is to a privileged rhetoric-or theory of linguistic figuration-which drives a wedge between textual meaning and the logic of ‘normal’, communicative discourse. The New Critics made do with a homespun vocabulary of tropes like ‘ambiguity’, ‘paradox’ and ‘irony’, figures that required no elaborate theory by which to back up their ontological claims about the nature of poetic language. Deconstruction developed out of the specialized idiom of postSaussurean linguistics, coupled to a critique of philosophical concepts far more ambitious than anything dreamt of in New Critical theory. Nevertheless-so the argument runs-this added sophistication cannot disguise the basic continuity of method and aims. Deconstruction merely pushes to its furthest extreme that divorce between rhetoric and reason which the ‘old’ New Criticism sought to impose. An ultra-refined model of linguistic structure is joined to a thoroughgoing Nietzschean scepticism about the possibility of achieving any knowledge outside the random play of textual meaning. Thus, for all its protestations to the contrary, deconstruction is put down as simply a more exotic, updated version of New Critical dogma.
