Deconstructive criticism | 14 | v2 | American Literary Criticism Since

ABSTRACT

When deconstruction ﬁrst emerged in public during the early 1970s among literary critics in the U.S., it was limited to a group of critics born during the interwar period, including-among others-Harold Bloom, Eugenio Donato, Paul de Man, Geoﬀrey Hartman, J. Hillis Miller, and Joseph Riddel. By the mid-and late 1970s a group of younger critics, mostly born after 1940, had emerged as deconstructors. Among the leaders of such deconstructive critics were Shoshana Felman, Barbara Johnson, Jeﬀrey Mehlman, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Several dozen more young critics could be listed here. Almost all of the above-named deconstructors, young and old, were associated at one time or another with either the Johns Hopkins University, or Yale University, or both. When Miller and de Man in the early 1970s left Hopkins, joining Bloom and Hartman at Yale, the so-called “Yale School” came into being and lasted until the mid-1980s. Younger colleagues and students of the four main Yale critics included Felman and Johnson among others. Because deconstruction spread quickly and widely in the late 1970s and early 1980s, it was not limited for long to one or two universities nor to a small group of a dozen or so critics. The key ﬁgure in the establishment of American deconstruction was the

philosopher Jacques Derrida, who taught in France and part-time in the United States, mainly at Yale, Cornell, and the University of California at Irvine from the early 1970s until his death in 2004. At the 1966 conference on structuralism, convened at the Johns Hopkins University, Derrida delivered a decisive critique of structuralist thought. The next year he published three books-Of Grammatology (trans. 1976), Speech and Phenomena (trans. 1973), and Writing and Diﬀerence (trans. 1978). The ﬁrst book extended the assault on structuralism; the second undertook a rigorous critique of Husserlian phenomenology; and the third oﬀered eleven essays expanding the attacks on structuralism and phenomenology and presenting inquiries into psychoanalysis and literature. From the outset Derridean deconstruction was not only “poststructuralist” and “post-phenomenological,” but positively oriented toward certain psychoanalytic and literary topics. Because the initial American reception of

Derrida was limited to those adept at reading French, the wide spread of Derridean thought occurred only in the late 1970s, when numerous translations started to appear. The translation of Of Grammatology by Gayatri Spivak played a particularly important role in this early transmission, since it oﬀered a prefatory monograph explaining in detail the historical context, the interdisciplinary scope, and the philosophical and critical signiﬁcance of Derrida’s project. A second wave of translations appearing several years later involved a half-

dozen books, especially Derrida’s Positions (1972; trans. 1981), Dissemination (1972; trans. 1981), and Margins of Philosophy (1972; trans. 1982). (Many pieces of Positions and Margins had been translated and published during the 1970s.) The ﬁrst work oﬀered lucid interviews in which Derrida explained his enterprise. The second contained exemplary deconstructive readings of texts by Plato, Mallarmé, and the novelist Sollers. The third presented additional essays on structuralism and phenomenology as well as on the important concept of diﬀerence and the status of rhetoric. Of the six books by Derrida mentioned, all were published in French by the early 1970s. The extensive work of Derrida after 1974 (ﬁve dozen books) played a relatively minor role in the establishment of deconstructive criticism in the United States. Within the numerous ranks of American deconstructors in the 1980s, disagreements occurred between true followers of Derrida and less faithful, more independent, and pragmatic critics. Of the leading literary deconstructors, old and young, few were dogmatic Derrideans, so they were sometimes charged with diluting authentic deconstruction and/or with distorting the actual drift of Derrida’s work. This was a common critique lodged against members of the Yale School. Oftentimes this debate centered around the relevance of Derrida’s other post-1973 texts, particularly Glas (1974; trans. 1986) and Spurs (1976; trans. 1976, 1979). Conversely, some critics disregarded Derrida’s works after Margins-the works of his “American phase”—perhaps because of an emergent dadaistic style. The lament was that America had ruined Derrida. Although all American deconstructors shared a certain legacy stemming from the critiques of structuralism and of phenomenology, they diﬀered from one another in their degrees of faithfulness to Derridean philosophy, their views of the relevance of psychoanalysis, their judgments about the pertinence of Derrida’s later work and style, and their assessments of the political import of deconstruction. The ﬁrst phase of the early development of deconstruction in America,

lasting from 1968 to 1972, entailed the formation of the doctrine. The second phase, from 1973 to 1977, involved passionate debates on and reviews of the early texts. The third phase, dating from 1978 to 1982, witnessed the dissemination and institutionalization of the school. It was during this phase that numerous translations appeared, including six of Derrida’s books and many essays. Also several introductions were published, as, for example, Jonathan Culler’s On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism (1982), my own Deconstructive Criticism: An Advanced Introduction (1982), and Christopher Norris’s Deconstruction: Theory and Practice (1982). The fourth phase, beginning in 1982, saw the extension of deconstruction to other

areas, including, for instance, theology, literary pedagogy, and politics. Among theological books were Deconstructing Theology (1982) by Mark C. Taylor and Deconstruction and Theology (1982), edited by Thomas J. J. Altizer and others. In the domain of literary pedagogy appeared a special issue of Yale French Studies on “The Pedagogical Imperative” (1982), edited by Barbara Johnson; certain essays in the symposium on “Professing Literature,” published by the Times Literary Supplement (December 1982); Reading Deconstruction/ Deconstructive Reading (1983) by G. Douglas Atkins; Applied Grammatology (1985) by Gregory L. Ulmer; and Writing and Reading Diﬀerently: Deconstruction and the Teaching of Composition and Literature (1985), edited by G. Douglas Atkins and Michael L. Johnson. Finally, a number of early books considered deconstruction within the context of politics, including Michael Ryan’s Marxism and Deconstruction (1982), The Yale Critics (1983), edited by Jonathan Arac and others, Christopher Butler’s Interpretation, Deconstruction, and Ideology (1984), Howard Felperin’s Beyond Deconstruction: The Uses and Abuses of Literary Power (1985), Michael Fischer’s Does Deconstruction Make Any Diﬀerence? (1985), and Rhetoric and Form: Deconstruction at Yale (1985), edited by Robert Con Davis and Ronald Schleifer. In the latter two phases and thereafter, deconstruction spread far beyond its early adherents, galvanizing large numbers of intellectuals in a struggle over the usefulness and impact of this School, now become movement. Commencing in the late 1970s, debates over deconstruction energized the ﬁeld of literary theory for two decades, mobilizing numerous antagonists and generating a massive secondary literature. It was not uncommon by the late 1970s to ﬁnd strands of deconstructive

thinking interwoven into the projects of certain formalists, phenomenologists, hermeneuticists, Marxists, structuralists, feminists, ethnic critics, postcolonial theorists, and cultural critics. We have already seen that deconstruction aﬀected the projects of such critics as Krieger, Booth, Magliola, Spanos, Jameson, and Culler. We recall that Susan Suleiman cast deconstruction as part of the hermeneutic branch of reader-response criticism. Its ability to spur critics of all persuasions, ranging from the ultraconservative to the radical, from the traditional humanist to the committed Marxist, from the empiricist and pragmatist to the philosophical idealist and realist, made of deconstruction a phenomenon reminiscent of New Criticism, which a generation earlier came to occupy the center stage of the ﬁeld of literary studies, making competing schools appear for a time marginal in comparison. Not surprisingly, deconstruction was dubbed early on the “new New Criticism.” This was so because it too came to occupy center stage, its leaders also were located at Yale, and its preferred critical approach was similarly text centered.