Harold Bloom is our greatest living literary critic. His wide-ranging critical writings have plumbed the depths of Romanticism (The Visionary Company), explored the anxiety caused by the influence of one generation of poets on another (Agon, The Anxiety of Influence), wrestled with the idea of a literary canon (The Western Canon), introduced Jacques Derrida and deconstruction to America (Deconstruction and Criticism), and explored the relationship between religion, especially Judaism, and literature (Kabbalah and Criticism, The Book of J).

Bloom is indeed a party of one, a truly strong poet of his own mode of religious-literary criticism, who, in a typically Emersonian manner, makes his own circumstances and sheds influences by incorporating them into his idiosyncratic theory.In this unprecedented full-length study on Harold Bloom, Agata Bielik-Robson explores the many facets of Bloom’s critical writings and career. In his work, she argues, Bloom draws on a variety of disparate traditions—Judaism, gnosis, Romanticism, American pragmatism, and Freudianism, but also, especially recently, Victorian aestheticism—that comprise a dialectical, difficult whole in a constant quarrel with itself. Yet, this is precisely the image of "life-in-antithesis," which constitutes Bloom’s highest speculative achievement, she observes. The Saving Lie brings all these "Blooms" together and, despite their own tendencies toward dissociation, lets them speak unisono: in one almost harmonious voice that will clearly utter the principles of a new speculative position—Bloom’s antithetical vitalism. This study of Bloom and his contributions will not soon be surpassed.

Strategies of Deconstruction was first published in 1991. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

In the past two decades, the "movement" of deconstruction has bad tremendous impact on a number of academic, disciplines in the United States. However, its force has been rather limited in the field of philosophy, despite the fact that in Europe the practice of deconstruction emerged in the work of philosophers. Although the reasons for this can be debated, two of the more obvious explanations are the mainstream Anglo-American philosophers rarely studied the German and French philosophical traditions in great detail, and deconstruction's focus on discourse and interpretation has made it more attractive to the literary and humanistic disciplines.

With this context, Strategies of Deconstruction focuses on the early work of Jacques Derrida, the French philosopher who introduced deconstruction in Speech and Phenomena,his study of Edmund Husserl, and Of Grammatology, and whose philosophical reputation stems in no small part from his work on Husserl. In examining the philosophical import of Derrida's theories of reading, text, and language, specifically as they related to Speech and Phenomena,J. Claude Evans makes careful reference to Husserl's own texts. His analysis indicates that there are many systematic irregularities in Derrida's study and that without those irregularities Derrida's conclusions cannot be substantiated.