Deconstruction: An American Institution

379 Pages·2021·6.49 MB·English

by  Gregory Jones-Katz

DECONSTRUCTION

DECONSTRUCTION
An American Institution
Gregory Jones- Katz
Th e University of Chicago Press Chicago and London
p ublication of this book has been aided
by a grant from the bevington fund.
Th e University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
Th e University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
© 2021 by Th e University of Chicago
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or
reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission,
except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and
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Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.
Published 2021
Printed in the United States of America
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ISBN- 13: 978- 0- 226- 53586- 9 (cloth)
ISBN- 13: 978- 0- 226- 53605-7 (paper)
ISBN- 13: 978- 0- 226- 53619- 4 (e- book)
DOI: https:// doi .org/ 10 .7208/ chicago/ 9780226536194 .001 .0001
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Jones-Katz, Gregory, author.
Title: Deconstruction : an American institution / Gregory Jones-Katz.
Description: Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2021. | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifi ers: LCCN 2020056566 | ISBN 9780226535869 (cloth) |
ISBN 9780226536057 (paperback) | ISBN 9780226536194 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Deconstruction. | Criticism—United States.
Classifi cation: LCC PN98.D43 J66 2021 | DDC 801/.950973—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020056566
Th is paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1 992
(Permanence of Paper).
To Laura—
Without you, I’d be homeless.

CONTENTS
Introduction 1
Chapter One
A Crisis in Undergraduate Literary Education at Yale:
Lit X and the Literature Major 19
Chapter Two
Evolution by Subversion:
Vanguard Critics and Protodeconstruction 65
Chapter Three
Deconstruction as a Pedagogical-I ntellectual Project
and the Burdens of Academic Criticism 125
Chapter Four
Feminist Cultural Politics:
Th e Brides of Deconstruction and Criticism 190
Chapter Five
Speaking in Tongues:
Th e de Man Aff air and History with(out) Rhetoric 238
Epilogue: Don’t Dream It’s Over 291
Acknowledgments 299
Notes 303
Index 359

INTRODUCTION
Has any approach to reading texts ever attracted such rancorous attention?
It was a Trojan Horse, esteemed literary critic and scholar René Wellek
warned in 1977, that would “destroy literary studies from the inside.”1
Because its practitioners argued that no text existed, Reagan- appointed
head of the National Endowment for the Humanities William Bennett
cautioned in 1982 that it threatened the basis of humanistic inquiry.2 News-
week imparted it with dramatic and destructive power, reporting in 1981
that its champions, who drew “heavily on Modern European theories
of language and have a decidedly nihilistic philosophy of life,” waged an
“all- out war” with “partisans of the humanist tradition who believe that
the purpose of [literary] criticism” should, “in Matthew Arnold’s words,
. . . ‘propagate the best that is known and thought in the world.’”3 In his
unexpected 1987 bestseller, classicist Allan Bloom memorably observed:
“Th e school” that disseminated it “is the last, predictable, stage in the sup-
pression of reason and the denial of the possibility of truth in the name
of philosophy.”4 And in 1991 screeds on the state of the American acad-
emy, social critic Camille Paglia caustically referred to it as a “bookworm
aff ectation by tunnel- vision careerists” that “systematically trashes high
culture by reducing everything to language and then making language
destroy itself.”5
“It” was deconstruction. Yet “it” was also a whack- a- mole, a lure of
sorts; enemies found “it” diffi cult to defi ne. For rather than a fi xed method
of reading, deconstruction was a set of sophisticated reading techniques
that identifi ed the rhetorical dimensions of a text, oft en a contradiction
that subverted the text’s own value- laden hierarchies, such as form/mean-
ing, literal/metaphorical, or original/imitation. In such conceptual para-
doxes, a key term struggled and failed to unite incompatible implications,
or a peripheral phenomenon was disclosed as repressed and in fact at