Abstract
This age of critical discourse is the best of times or it is the worst of times, depending on one’s point of view; but there is no denying that it is a very diverse and lively time. Never have the presuppositions and procedures of literary criticism been put so drastically into question, and never have we been presented with such radical alternatives for conceiving and making sense of literary texts. Among the competing theories of the last few decades we find reader-response criticism (itself divisible into a variety of subspedes), reception criticism, anxiety-of-influence critidsm, structuralist criticism, semiotic criticism and — most ominous to many traditional ears — deconstructive criticism. It was not many years ago that announcements of jobs for professors of literature began to be supplemented by requests for professors of literary criticism. Now we find increasing requests for professors of the theory of criticism — professors, that is, whose profession is metacriticism.
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Notes
David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford, 1928) pp. 67, 73, 197, 265.
Jacques Derrida, ‘Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences’, in The Structuralist Controversy, ed. Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato (Baltimore, Md., 1970) ‘Discussion’, p. 272.
Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore, Md., 1976) p. 163; see also p. 158.
‘Structure, Sign, and Play’, p. 249. See also Derrida, Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago, Ill., 1981) p. 5.
Hume, Treatise, p. 264.
Ibid., pp. 265, 183, 269–70.
Derrida, ‘Signature Event Context’, Glyph, vol. 1 (1977) p. 195.
Derrida, ‘Structure, Sign, and Play’, pp. 264–5.
See, for example, ‘Structure, Sign, and Play’, ‘Discussion’, pp. 270–1; ‘Signature Event Context’, pp. 174, 193; Dissemination, pp. 43–4.
‘Differance’, in Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, trans. David B. Allison (Evanston, Ill., 1973) p. 156.
‘Signature, Event, Context’, pp. 174, 192. See also Derrida, ‘Living on: Border Lines’, in Deconstruction and Criticism, ed. Geoffrey Hartman (New York, 1979) p. 78: ‘Hence no context is saturable any more.... No meaning can be fixed or decided upon.’ And p. 81: ‘No meaning can be determined out of context, but no context permits saturation.’
‘Signature, Event, Context’, pp. 172, 186, 191.
Ibid., pp. 174, 193, 195.
‘Living on: Border Lines’, pp. 83, 142.
Ibid., pp. 83–4.
For example, Of Grammatology, p. 243: Rousseau’s ‘declared intention is not annulled... but rather inscribed within a system it no longer dominates’. ‘Signature, Even, Context’, p. 192: in ‘a differential typology of forms of iteration... the category of intention will not disappear; it will have its place, but from that place it will no longer be able to govern the entire scene and system of utterance’.
Of Grammatology, p. 158. Derrida adds (pp. 158–9) that the exigencies of standard interpretive commentary, though it is an ‘indispensable guardrail’, ‘has always only protected, it has never opened a reading’. A critical reading, however, which recognises that, in the inescapable lack of a ‘natural presence’, a text ‘has never been anything but writing’ — that is, ‘substitutive significations which could only come forth in a chain of differential references’ — ‘opens’ meaning and language, as he puts it, ‘to infinity’.
Hume, Treatise, pp. 182, 186–7, 267. Hume’s idiom for describing his dilemmas at times converges with that favoured by Derrida. For example, Hume declares in the Treatise that in reconsidering his section on the self, or personal identity, he finds, himself ‘involv’d in such a labyrinth, that... I neither know how to correct my former opinions, nor how to render them consistent’, and ends in the undecidability of what Derrida calls the ‘doubt bind’ of an ‘aporia’; ‘In short there are two principles, which I cannot render consistent; nor is it in my power to renounce either of them’ (‘Appendix’, pp. 633, 636).
Ibid., pp. 270, 273.
Of Grammatology, pp. 24, 314, 164; also ‘Structure, Sign and Play’, pp. 250–1: ‘We have no language — no syntax and no lexicon — which is alien to this history [of metaphysics]; we cannot utter a single deconstructive proposition which has not already slipped into the form, the logic, and the implicit postulations of precisely what it seeks to contest.... Every particular borrowing drags along with it the whole of inetaphysics.’
Of Grammatology, p. 14; ‘Structure, Sign and Play’, p. 264; ‘Differance’, p. 159.
‘Structure, Sign, and Play’, ‘Discussion’, p. 271.
‘White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy’, New Literary History, 6 (1974) 48–9; ‘Living on’, p. 91; Dissemination, pp. 25–6. See also ‘Signature, Event, Context’, pp. 173, 181, 188, 195.
Paul de Man, ‘Introduction’ to the special issue entitled ‘The Rhetoric of Romanticism’, Studies in Romanticism, vol. 28 (1979) p. 498.
J. Hillis Miller, ‘On the Edge: the Crossways of Contemporary Critidsm’, in Romanticism and Contemporary Criticism, ed. Morris Eavs and Michael Fischer (Ithaca, N.Y., 1986) p. 110. All subsequent page references to this essay are in the text.
Miller identifies the ‘she’ referred to in the poem as ‘Lucy’ on the standard grounds that we have convincing reasons to believe that Wordsworth intended ‘A Slumber’ to be one of a group of five short lyrics — what Miller calls ‘the Lucy poems as a group’ (p. 106). In the other four poems, the girl is named as ‘Lucy’, and Lucy, as one of the poems puts it, ‘is in her grave, and oh,/The difference to me’.
The disagreement about ‘A Slumber’ between Cleanth Brooks and F. W. Bateson (which E. D. Hirsch has publicised and made a notable interpretive crux) has to do solely with this issue. (See E. D. Hirsch, Jr. Validity in Interpretation, New Haven, Conn., and London, 1967, pp. 227–30.) Both readers construe the text as signifying that a girl who was alive in the first stanza is dead in the second; their disagreement is about what we are to infer about the speaker’s state of mind from the terms in which he represents the circumstance of her death. Brooks says that the dosing lines ‘suggest... [his] agonized shock at the loved one’s present lack of motion... her utter and horrible inertness’; Bateson claims that his ‘mood’ mounts to ‘the pantheistic magnificence of the last two lines.... Lucy is actually more alive now that she is dead, because she is now a part of the life of Nature, and not just a human “thing”’. Miller’s description of the lyric speaker’s state of mind seems to me much more attuned to what the speaker says than either of these extreme versions.
Paul de Man, ‘The Rhetoric of Temporality’, in Interpretation: Theory and Practice, ed. Charles A. Singleton (Baltimore, Md., 1969) pp. 205–6.
Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading (New Haven, Conn., 1979), p. 205; see also p. 131.
As Miller puts it, the poem instances the way in which, in any ‘given work of literature... metaphysical assumptions are both present and at the same time undermined by the text itself’ (‘On Edge’, p. 101).
From The Abelard Folk Song Book, ed. Abner Graboff (New York and London, 1958).
Derrida, ‘White Mythology’, p. 74.
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Abrams, M.H. (1989). Construing and Deconstructing. In: Rajnath (eds) Deconstruction: A Critique. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-10335-5_3
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