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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Theory at Yale: The Strange Case of Deconstruction in America

Theory at Yale: The Strange Case of Deconstruction in America

Redfield, Marc

Hardcover

Series: Lit Z

PhilosophyLiterary Criticism

ISBN10: 0823268667
ISBN13: 9780823268665
Publisher: Fordham Univ Pr
Published: Nov 2 2015
Pages: 272
Weight: 1.19
Height: 0.90 Width: 6.10 Depth: 9.10
Language: English

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.

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