“Central to the story of deconstruction, but often neglected, are the various American contexts that cultivated and disseminated deconstructive undertakings.”
“Even though the image—to some, the bogeyman—of the European theorist persists, the truth is that deconstructive literary theory was largely an indigenous creation.”
“If one had to pinpoint ground zero for the eruption of deconstruction onto the American stage, it would have to be Yale, where a group of literary critics, theorists, and philosophers of literature—Harold Bloom, Paul de Man, Geoffrey Hartman, and J. Hillis Miller—executed deconstructive readings with great élan and to great intellectual and pedagogical effect during the ’70s and early ’80s.”
“Barbara Johnson, a graduate student and then professor of French and comparative literature during this period, explained in a 1987 interview that Yale’s comparative literature department played a key role not so much in domesticating as in generating deconstructive practices in America, and it did so on distinctly American terms.”
“The first deconstructive courses in U.S. departments of literature were offered in Yale’s comparative literature department, for example, beginning with a class on Nietzsche taught by de Man in 1971. By the early ’80s, several generations of American academics venerated de Man’s work, while their European counterparts were just beginning to discover him.”
“Yale’s institutional history and its relation to contemporary American politics and social life helped to disseminate deconstructive thinking throughout the United States. Until the mid-seventies, Yale had boasted several prominent New Critics, including the movement’s most recognizable figures: Cleanth Brooks, W. K. Wimsatt, and Robert Penn Warren.”
“The upheavals of the sixties, however, produced a younger generation of literary critics with a longing for an interpretive theory that emphasized the political and social dimensions of literature, as well as differences and divisions within it—precisely those aspects of prose and poetry that the New Critics fused into an autonomous and unified whole.”
“By subverting the New Critical way of reading, the Yale Group—who in their distinctive ways considered great poetry not a harmony realized via paradoxes, ironies, and ambiguities but a dissonance achieved by way of contradictions, inconsistencies, and uncertainties—tilled propitious soil in the American academy.”
“A younger generation of American literary critics saw deconstructive writers mirroring the politics of the time. As Johnson observed, while “there’s no political program . . . I think there’s a political attitude, which is to examine authority in language.””
“Consider the influential 1976 debate, “The Limits of Pluralism,” that took place at the first session of the Modern Language Association’s Division on Philosophical Approaches to Literature. This panel signaled a shift in the orientation of American literary criticism toward more self-consciously philosophical methodologies and marked the wider attention given across America to questions about the constraints of identity and meaning.”
“The first translated works of or about Derrida portrayed his claims as the latest example of a long line of French solipsism, relativism, and nihilism. Other portrayals failed to transpose the French intellectual contexts of Derrida’s work into the literary critical scene in the United States. In still other accounts, Derrida’s deconstruction was portrayed as an enemy of the analytic philosophical tradition dominant in Anglo-American departments of philosophy since the ’50s.”
“All the while, the deconstructive endeavors of the Yale School continued to ferment in departments of literature, and did so via teaching, publications, and lectures.”
“To give just a few examples: Barbara Johnson helped make Derrida’s work accessible to Anglophone readers and cemented Mary Shelley’s place in the Romantic literary canon. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (a student of Miller at Yale) penned groundbreaking deconstructive work that helped create the field of queer studies. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (another student of de Man) applied deconstructive interpretive tactics to diverse theoretical engagements and textual analyses in feminism, Marxism, and postcolonialism.”
“Joan Wallach Scott’s rejection of traditional gender categories, for instance, helped launch the field of gender history, and Judith Butler (who received her Ph.D. in philosophy from Yale) extended that work to shape a generation of scholarship and activism. By the late ’80s, deconstructive reading had moved from literature to history and society at large.”
“Today, deconstructive habits of mind within the academy are largely considered not so much controversial as passé. Still, there remains the question of how and why the deconstructive tradition became such a formidable pattern of thought in the United States.”
“To answer that question, Americans might—in an ironic twist—consider the February 2014 protests in France against the legalization of same-sex marriage. Those protestors objected to the equality advanced by the new grade school pedagogy ostensibly inspired by American gender theory, above all that of deconstructionist Judith Butler. “La théorie du genre,” according to French protestors, originated on the other side of the Atlantic. We might also consider why, as Fredric Jameson noted in 2015, Americans tend to believe the “good tidings” of theory—including deconstruction—were brought from Europe, while Chinese literary scholars, say, consider theory an American invention.”
“These perceptions of the origin and flow of ideas should give pause to those who consider deconstruction essentially French.”