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Just the Facts, Please
| Article
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19195 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
7 / 1991 |
4,564 Words |
| Author
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David J. Rothman
David J. Rothman's essays, reviews and poems have appeared in
a number of journals including Society, the Kenyon Review and
The World & I. |
SIGNS OF THE TIMES
Deconstruction and The Fall of Paul de Man
David Lehman
New York: Poseidon Press, 1991
299 pp., $21.95
The word deconstruction has had an astonishing career over the twenty-five years since Jacques Derrida first introduced American intellectuals to his neologism at a Johns Hopkins symposium on structuralism. In its early days, it remained a way to characterize a complex and highly skeptical approach to the history of philosophy that interested only a small, if important, coterie of intellectuals working at the confluence of Saussurian linguistics, continental semiotics, structuralism, and phenomenology. Then, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, it exfoliated a difficult system of literary criticism, primarily among a group of audacious Yale professors led by Paul de Man, J. Hillis Miller, and Geoffrey Hartman. This was the beginning of what has come to be known as literary or critical theory, a very different phenomenon from both earlier theories of literature and the critical theory that grew out of neo-Marxist movements like the Frankfurt School. The rest, as the saying goes (assuming one is not a theorist), is history.
It is probably fair to say that the Yale literature professors who embraced Derrida and deconstruction, and who sought quite actively to transform their profession, succeeded beyond their expectations, for in the last decade deconstruction and its continuously mutating theoretical progeny--gender studies, the new historicism, cultural studies, gay studies, and others--have been fully institutionalized in literature departments throughout the United States. Indeed, it is in the language and literature departments of American universities where Derrida has had by far the greatest influence, not in Europe. The adherents of these approaches, like members of warring gangs, battle ever more fiercely with traditional scholars and with each other for the authority to define literature in the university and to influence the agendas of language and literature departments. The annual job lists of the Modern Language Association attest to this. They now feature many job descriptions that call for theorists of various stripes, making it clear that departments have created openings expressly for them and appointed funds for those positions.
One important aim of the new theorists, following Derrida and other thinkers in the same tradition such as Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, and, by now, many
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