Theory at Yale
Subtitle: the strange case of deconstruction in America
By: Marc Redfield
Edition: First edition.
Series: Lit Z; Lit z
Published: 2016
Language: eng
Number of pages: 256
ISBN-13: 9780823268665; 9780823268672
Subjects: Deconstruction; Criticism
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 re-examinations 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", works that offer subtle, complex reflections on the peculiar event of theory as-deconstruction in America"--

"This book examines the affinity between the notions of "theory" and "deconstruction" that developed in the American academy in the 1970s by way of a semi-fictional collective, the "Yale Critics": Harold Bloom, Paul de Man, Geoffrey Hartman, and J. Hillis Miller, in association with the French philosopher Jacques Derrida"--
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (pages 191-249) and index.
Table of contents: title: Introduction: The Strange Case of "Theory"; title: 1. Theory, Deconstruction, and the Yale Critics; title: 2. Theory and Romantic Lyric: The Case of "A slumber did my spirit seal"; title: 3. What Remains: Geoffrey Hartman and the Shock of Imagination; title: 4. Literature, Incorporated: Harold Bloom, Theory, and the Canon; title: 5. Professing Theory: Paul de Man and the Institution of Reading; title: 6. Querying, Quarrying: Mark Tansey's Paintings of Theory's Grand Canyon.