REVIEWS
"The power of Gregory Jones-Katz’s extraordinarily well-researched Deconstruction, apart from dodging the extremes of obeisance and dismissal, is not to have adopted deconstruction’s aversion toward situating the movement in its time and place. He capably walks his reader through the fine-grained details of seminal texts, but also wisely moves beyond them, perhaps implying that the school’s interest for us today lies less in its stable of familiar themes than in its improbable success."
— Chronicle of Higher Education
“A penetrating, illuminating, and highly readable study of a crucial episode in the intellectual and cultural history of late twentieth-century America. Jones-Katz pursues the trajectories of the American practitioners of deconstructionist thought with great insight, deep research, and stylistic verve. He offers many cogent accounts of the works and arguments of this sizeable group, and does so not only with attention to the inner logics of specific texts, but with considerable attention to their intellectual and institutional contexts.”
— Warren Breckman, author of Adventures of the Symbolic: Postmarxism and Radical Democracy
“An excellent, important, and timely book, calling our attention to a revolution in American intellectual life during the 1970s and ’80s. Jones-Katz guides us through the various ecosystems in which deconstructive thought was fostered and developed, showing us how it was able to take American academia by storm.”
— Edward Baring, author of Converts to the Real: Catholicism and the Making of Continental Philosophy
“An illuminating, often surprising account of deconstruction in American academia in the last third of the twentieth century. As one present at the creation and ascendancy of the ‘Hermeneutic Mafia,’ I repeatedly nodded assent—often with a chuckle—at his portraits of characters whom I had then encountered. Deconstruction is undoubtedly an inviting, important, and well-wrought contribution to modern American intellectual history.”
— Robert Westbrook, author of Democratic Hope: Pragmatism and the Politics of Truth
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction - Gregory Jones-Katz
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226536194.003.0001
[academic culture;higher education;rhetorical reading;Yale University;domestic]
Challenging and deflating common misrepresentations of deconstruction in America, Jones-Katz orients readers away from narratives that portray deconstruction as an imported cultural phenomenon from Europe, a mistranslation and/or misappropriation of a Parisian intellectual movement. While accounting for Continental influences, Jones-Katz turns to more local and domestic circumstances in the United States that gave rise to deconstruction. But Deconstruction’s chapters and their central arguments do not add up to a tale of “American exceptionalism.” Rather, as Jones-Katz outlines in this introduction, particular (post)sixties settings and influences—from intellectual practices to institutional and departmental cultures and disciplinary traditions to structural changes at the university level—aided and abetted the emergence of deconstruction in America. Foregrounding the rhetorical reading techniques developed by literary critics and taught in classrooms during the 1970s at Yale University, Jones-Katz offers the story of deconstruction as a window on the sanctified beliefs and scientific pretensions of humanistic inquiry, the linguistic turn, the desacralization of academic culture, and the (post)halcyon days of higher education. (pages 1 - 18)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
A Crisis in Undergraduate Literary Education at Yale: Lit X and the Literature Major - Gregory Jones-Katz
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226536194.003.0002
[sixties;literary education;Yale University;new critics;metaphysical hierarchies;literature major;Peter Brooks;Michael Holquist;Alvin Kernan]
In this chapter, Jones-Katz examines how Yale literature professors Peter Brooks, Michael Holquist, and Alvin Kernan responded to a crisis in literary education by instituting a groundbreaking pedagogical program in the early 1970s that established conditions for the American institution of deconstruction. Precipitated by students’ “extraliterary” interestsand informed bysixties’ upheaval, teachers’ fears about the damage wrought by overspecialization, and pressures created by the golden age of higher education’s end, this group’s local reformation of undergraduate literary education encouraged students to question the metaphysical hierarchies that organized literary study. Rather than venerating prose and poetry as the New Critics had done, teachers and undergraduates in the Literature Major “deconstructed” high and low, prose and poetry, and literary and nonliterary texts, in order to appreciate cultural items as fictions. Opposition at Yale came, with conservative professors charging the Lit Major of advancing a destructive manner of reading that promoted philistinism and satisfied literary-critical vanguards’ excessive demands for new reading techniques. Though proponents saw it as recapturing the distinctiveness of literature at Yale and the power of literary culture in general, opponents viewed the Lit Major as exacerbating the crisis in literary education by demolishing the singularity and autonomy of literature. (pages 19 - 64)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Evolution by Subversion: Vanguard Critics and Protodeconstruction - Gregory Jones-Katz
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226536194.003.0003
[transatlantic;higher education;new criticism;formalism;John Hopkins University;Yale Colloquium;protodeconstruction;Geoffrey Hartman;J. Hillis Miller]
Scholars’ frequent emphasis on the transatlantic shuttling of postmodern French thought, most conspicuously structuralism and its progeny, to American humanities departments during the second half of the 1960s has obscured the role that a group of vanguard literary critics played in the institution of deconstruction in the United States. Revising the common story, Jones-Katz unearths the ways that Paul de Man, Geoffrey Hartman, J. Hillis Miller, and colleagues, as far back as the closing years of the 1950s, challenged the dominant mode of “normal” criticism in America, the quasi-scientific literary formalism of the New Critics, to institute a protodeconstructive literary-critical movement. Committed to concentrating on texts’ linguistic forms, the New Criticism had become a pedagogical standard thanks to the demands of and support given by the modern higher education system. Beginning in the early 1960s, the vanguard critics skillfully navigated new and established domestic intellectual and institutional networks, honing and harnessing reading techniques that extended and critiqued New Critical precepts. Sharing their innovative work at a Yale colloquium, a Johns Hopkins symposium, or abroad at a conference in Bellagio, vanguard critics’ evolution by way of subverting New Critical interpretive principles set the stage for the successes of the Yale School. (pages 65 - 124)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Deconstruction as a Pedagogical-Intellectual Project and the Burdens of Academic Criticism - Gregory Jones-Katz
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226536194.003.0004
[post sixties;literary humanism;literary study;rhetoric;postformalism;linguistic turn;deconstruction;Yale School;romantics;Harold Bloom]
Throughout the 1970s and early 1980s, Yale, its traditions and communities, facilitated the pedagogical-intellectual postformalist project of the “Yale School,” a central avenue for the American institution of deconstruction. Composed of Paul de Man, Geoffrey Hartman,J. Hillis Miller, Harold Bloom, and Jacques Derrida, the Yale School, in classrooms, in publications, and at conference presentations, grappled with the interpretive demands that literature exerted on readers, producing vibrant interpretations of canonical writings and fashioning a discipline of reading that aimed to establish “rhetoric” as the general science of interpretation. The Yale School subverted, often via European Romantics’ texts, the onto-theological dualities that structured literary study, offering a rigorously reflexive brand of criticism that supplanted the New Criticism. This endeavor was an ironic and challenging instantiation of the wider linguistic turn twisting the American humanities in the 1970s. By 1980, however, a medley of voices—Marxists, cultural conservatives, philosophers, biographers,historians, and more—opposed deconstruction, frequently charging it with a foreign-based hyperspecialism that destroyed the efficacy of (literary) humanism. Such responses to the revisionist goals of the Yale School’s project, often expressions of the post-sixties worries about academia having become a postmodern Babel, marked the institution of deconstruction in America. (pages 125 - 189)
This chapter is available at:
University Press Scholarship Online
Feminist Cultural Politics: The Brides of Deconstruction and Criticism - Gregory Jones-Katz
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226536194.003.0005
[post sixties;cultural politics;feminism;Yale University;masculine metaphysics;gender hierarchies;psychoanalysis;women’s studies;Barbara Johnson;Shoshana Felman]
Here, Jones-Katz reveals the routinely overlooked though essential contributions that a cadre of feminists made to the American institution of deconstruction. Informed by post-sixties second-wave feminist teachings and writings as well as the politics of the gay liberation movement, Yale’s feminist deconstructive wing, composed of Judith Butler, Margaret Ferguson, Shoshana Felman, Margaret Homans, Barbara Johnson, Mary Poovey, Jack Winkler, Eve Sedgwick, Gayatri Spivak, and others, overcame the formalist methodological impasse by rigorously redirecting deconstructive reading toward the paradoxes that undermined the metaphysical hierarchies of gender, sexual difference, race, and psychoanalysis. During the second half of the 1970s, despite opposition from Yale colleagues and threat of retrenchment, feminist deconstructionists and their subversions of the masculine metaphysics of (literary) humanism effectively aided not only fellow feminists’ curricula and scholarship, including the establishment of a Women’s Studies program, but also, by the early 1980s, altered fields of inquiry, such as Mary Shelley studies, Romantic studies, Lacan studies, and Subaltern studies, and established others, such as trauma studies, queer theory, and gender studies. Yale’s feminist deconstructionists were fellow travelers in the larger academic cultural left, expanding the cognitive limits of the humanities and helping to advance a postmodern feminist cultural program across the country. (pages 190 - 237)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Speaking in Tongues: The de Man Affair and History with(out) Rhetoric - Gregory Jones-Katz
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226536194.003.0006
[culture wars;Yale School;de Man Affair;collaboration;nazi;Jacques Derrida;Paul de Man;University of California Irvine]
In the mid-1980s, after de Man’s death, the Yale School disbanded, with several members leaving for the University of California, Irvine. There, the American institution of deconstruction profitably hitched its fortunes to the culture around and support for theory on the West Coast. Yet, tranquility—and the opportunities it fostered—was fleeting. The shocking revelation, in 1987, of a young de Man’s articles for collaborationist newspapers in occupied Belgium during World War II shook the foundations of the deconstructive edifice. Long simmering resentments nurtured by the virtual closing of professional doors in the post-golden age of higher education and a decade-long ritual of casting deconstruction as a cliquish, nihilistic method of reading framed the intellectual mêlées of the ensuing de Man Affair. This tempest in an academic teapot took on wider significance in the greater “culture wars” and garnered attention thanks to the growing interest in memory, heritage, and commemoration across the Atlantic world. Ultimately, the public soul-searching of de Man’s colleagues, especially Jacques Derrida’s deconstructions of de Man’s wartime writings, served to fan the flames, as the specialized language of deconstruction further polarized debate. (pages 238 - 290)
This chapter is available at:
University Press Scholarship Online
Epilogue: Don’t Dream It’s Over - Gregory Jones-Katz
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226536194.003.0007
[post cold war;neoliberalism;public education;humanities;austerity]
In this, Deconstruction’s conclusion, Jones-Katz traces how the post-Cold War neoliberalization of the American academy undermined the vision that with sufficient support, humanities students and scholars might enjoy and value culture for its intrinsic worth. While foregrounding this transformation, Jones-Katz outlines the trajectories and legacies of core members of the Yale School, including the group’s most influential wing, the Brides of Deconstruction and Criticism, and Jacques Derrida, the philosophical figure and subsequent “theory star” whose popularity and wide-ranging appeal during the 1990s contributed to the obfuscation of Paul de Man’s and his colleagues’ importance. In the end, Jones-Katz stresses that the Yale group serves as a historical example of the humanities’ power and argues that countering the institutional and intellectual sea change brought about by the pervasive defunding of university life requires significant reinvestment. Only a concerted effort to overturn the policies of “perma-austerity,” which have so damaged public tertiary education, can ensure that the dreams dreamt in the academic humanities may, once again, help build our reality. (pages 291 - 298)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
