Theory at Yale
The Strange Case of Deconstruction in America
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- $31.99
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- $31.99
Publisher Description
This book examines the affinity between “theory” and “deconstruction” that developed in the American academy in the 1970s by way of the “Yale Critics”: Harold Bloom, Paul de Man, Geoffrey Hartman, and J. Hillis Miller, sometimes joined by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida.
With this semi-fictional collective, theory became a media event, first in the academy and then in the wider print media, in and through its phantasmatic link with deconstruction and with “Yale.” The important role played by aesthetic humanism in American pedagogical discourse provides a context for understanding theory as an aesthetic scandal, and an examination of the ways in which de Man’s work challenges aesthetic pieties helps us understand why, by the 1980s, he above all had come to personify “theory.”
Combining a broad account of the “Yale Critics” phenomenon with a series of careful reexaminations of the event of theory, Redfield traces the threat posed by language’s unreliability and inhumanity in chapters on lyric, on Hartman’s representation of the Wordsworthian imagination, on Bloom’s early theory of influence in the 1970s together with his later media reinvention as the genius of the Western Canon, and on John Guillory’s influential attempt to interpret de Manian theory as a symptom of literature’s increasing marginality. A final chapter examines Mark Tansey’s paintings Derrida Queries de Man and Constructing the Grand Canyon, paintings that offer subtle, complex reflections on the peculiar event of theory-as-deconstruction in America.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Redfield (The Rhetoric of Terror) deftly weaves case studies, intellectual histories, and analyses into this educational and, at times, revelatory account of the rise of European literary deconstruction theory in the U.S. Focusing on the Yale Critics J. Hillis Miller, Geoffrey Hartman, Harold Bloom, and Paul de Man and the pervasive influence of Jacques Derrida, Redfield describes the "mediatization" of literary theory, beginning in the 1970s and '80s, that continues to inform the humanities to this day. He provides a detailed assessment of the relationships among aesthetic discourse, literary theory, and romanticism before delving into the different meanings attached to the word theory. The most compelling chapter is the fifth, which introduces de Man as the "charismatic master" of deconstruction. Eschewing "straightforward accounts" of any of the critics presented in favor of "slanted approaches," Redfield's arguments are (sometimes appropriately) meandering, but they culminate in a revelatory and direct final chapter. In this section, the inclusion of "Derrida Queries de Man" and "Constructing the Grand Canyon," two 1990 paintings by Mark Tansey, allows Redfield to further his paradoxical understanding of theory as de Manian "resistance to theory" and to highlight deconstruction's cultural significance outside the academy.
