Abstract
In the polarised scenario of contemporary criticism, deconstruction has willingly played the role of the arch antagonist and dismantler of traditional scholarship, assaulting the notion of a fixed and determinable meaning, and the authority of any particular system of reading fueled, according to Jacques Derrida, by the ‘powerful, systematic, and irrepresible desire for such a signified’.1 Certain deconstructionist pronouncements, especially when lifted out of their qualifying contexts, have contributed to the misconception that poststructuralist theory is adverse to disciplined, ‘thoughtful’ reading, blocking the process of interpretation even before it had a chance to articulate anything: ‘Modern hermeneutics … is actually a negative hermeneutics. On its older function of saving the text, of tying it once again to the life of the mind, is superimposed the new one of doubting, by a parodistic or playful movement, master theories that claim to have overcome the past, the dead, the false. There is no Divine or Dialectic Science which can help us purify history absolutely, to pass in our lifetime a last judgment on it’.2
Catachresis is the name for that procedure whereby James uses all the realistic detail of his procedure as a novelist to name in figure, by a violent, forced and abusive transfer, something else for which there is no literary name and therefore, within the convention of referentiality which the story as a realistic novel accepts, no existence.
J. Hillis Miller, ‘The Figure in the Carpet’ (p. 111)
The difference that reading makes is, most generally writing. The thinking through, the ‘working through’ … is hard to imagine without writing. Certain poets, like Mallarmé, even seek a type of writing that would end reading as tourism or as merely reflection on a prior and exotic fact.
Geoffrey Hartman, ‘Understanding Criticism’ (p. 149)
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Notes and References
Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), p. 49.
Geoffrey Hartman, ‘Literary Criticism and Its Discontents’, Critical Inquiry, 3 (1976): 211–2.
Geoffrey Hartman, ‘Understanding Criticism’, in Writing and Reading Differently: Deconstruction and the Teaching of Composition and Literature, ed. C. Douglas Atkins and Michael L. Johnson (Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 1985), pp. 159–60.
Christopher Norris, Paul de Man: Deconstruction and the Critique of Aesthetic Ideology (London and New York: Routledge, Chapman and Hall, Inc., 1988), p. 89.
De Man, Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, second ed. rev. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983; 1st ed. 1971), p. 111.
Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 33.
Barbara Johnson, A World of Difference (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), p. 13.
Paul de Man, ‘Shelley Disfigured,’ in Deconstruction and Criticism, ed. Harold Bloom et al. (New York: Seabury Press, 1979), p. 53.
John D. Caputo, Radical Hermeneutics: Repetition, Deconstruction, and the Hermeneutic Project (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), pp. 4–5.
See the first section, ‘Tympan’, of Derrida’s Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982); also Derrida’s analysis of the ‘fold’, ‘hymen’, ‘membrane’, ‘sheet’ in Mallarmé’s Mimique, (Dissemination, pp. 173–287).
For a good discussion of Derrida’s exploitation and critique of boundaries, see Jonathan Culler, ‘At the Boundaries: Barthes and Derrida’, in At the Boundaries: Proceedings of the Northeastern University Center for Literary Studies, vol. 1 (1983): 23 45.
J. Hillis Miller, ‘The Figure in the Carpet’, Poetics Today, 3 (1980): 107–18.
See Derrida, ‘The Parergon’, October, 9 (1979): 3–40.
Robert L. Caserio, Plot, Story, and the Novel: From Dickens and Poe to the Modern Period (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), p. 225.
C. Douglas Atkins, Reading Deconstruction: Deconstructing Reading (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1983), p. 69.
Miller, ‘Narrative and History’, ELH, 41 (1974): 471.
Miller, Fiction and Repetition: Seven English Novels (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982), p. 68.
Miller, ‘Ariadnés Thread: Repetition and the Narrative Line’, Critical Inquiry 3 (1976): 57–78.
Rpt. in Interpretation of Narrative, ed. Mario J. Valdés and Owen J. Miller (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979/1981), pp. 148–66.
Miller, Thomas Hardy: Distance and Desire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970), p. viii.
Miller, ‘Deconstructing the Deconstructers’, Diacritics, 5/2 (Summer 1975): 31.
J. Hillis Miller, The Form of Victorian Fiction (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame, 1968), p. 16.
Shlomith Rimmon, The Concept of Ambiguity — the Example of James (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1977). See my own discussion of Rimmon’s analysis in chapter 6.
Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, ‘Deconstructive Reflections on Deconstruction: In Reply to Hillis Miller’, Poetics Today, 211b (1980/81): 187.
Miller, ‘Williams’ Spring and All and the Progress of Poetry’, Daedalus, 99 (1970): 429.
Miller, ‘The Function of Rhetorical Study at the Present Time’, ADE Bulletin, 62 (September-November 1979): 12.
Paul de Man, Foreword to Carol Jacobs, The Dissimulating Harmony (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), p. xi.
Paul de Man, The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), p. 80.
Neil Hertz similarly notes de Man’s ‘particular way of combining analysis and pathos, of blending technical arguments about operations of rhetoric ... with language — his own and that of the texts he cites — whose recurrent figures are strongly marked and whose themes are emotively charged, not to say, melodramatic’. See ‘Lurid Figures’, in Reading de Man Reading, ed. Wlad Godzich and Lindsay Waters (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1988), pp. 82–104.
Jonathan Culler, ‘Reading Lyric’, Yale French Studies, 69 (1985): 106.
Geoffrey Hartman, ‘Tea and Totality: the Demand of Theory on Critical Style’, in After Strange Texts: The Role of Theory in the Study of Literature, ed. Gregory S. Jay and David L. Miller (University: University of Alabama Press, 1985), p. 30.
J. Hillis Miller, ‘Composition and Decomposition: Deconstruction and the Teaching of Writing’, in Composition & Literature: Bridging the Gap, ed. Winifred Bryan Homer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), p. 48.
John K. Sheriff, The Fate of Meaning: Charles Peirce, Structuralism and Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), pp. 32, 44.
Gasché, ‘Unscrambling Positions: On Gerald Graff’s Critique of Deconstruction’, MLN, 5 (1981): 1015–34.
Miller, ‘A Guest in the House: Reply to Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan’s Reply’, Poetics Today, 2/1b (1980/81): 190.
John R. Boly, ‘Deconstruction as a General System: Tropes, Disciplines, Politics’, Cultural Critique, 11 (Winter 1988–89): 188–9.
Christopher Butler, Interpretation, Deconstruction, and Ideology (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), p. 71.
Vincent B. Leitch, Deconstructive Criticism: An Advanced Introduction (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), p. 224.
See especially the collection of essays edited by C. Douglas Atkins and Michael Johnson, Writing and Reading Differently: Deconstruction and the Teaching of Composition and Literature (Lawrence: Kansas University Press, 1985), with contributions from Vincent B. Leitch, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Gregory L. Ulmer, David Kaufer and Gary Waller, Sharon Crowley, J. Hillis Miller, Nancy R. Comley, Barbara Johnson, Geoffrey Hartman.
Gregory L. Ulmer, ‘Textshop for Post(e)pedagogy’, in Writing and Reading Differently, p. 56. For a similar argument, see Vincent B. Leitch, ‘Deconstruction and Pedagogy’, in Theory in the Classroom, ed. Cary Nelson (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), p. 53.
Miller, ‘Stevens’ Rock and Criticism as Cure, II’, Georgia Review, 30 (1976): 332.
See Cedric Watts, ‘Bottom’s Children: the Fallacies of Structuralism, Post-Structuralism and Deconstructionist Literary Theory’, in Lawrence Lerner, Reconstructing Literature (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983), pp. 20–35.
James Gribble, Literary Education: a Reevaluation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 79, 87.
Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), p. 148.
William E. Cain, ‘English in America Reconsidered: Theory, Criticism, Marxism, and Social Change’, in Criticism in the University, ed. Gerald Graff and Reginald Gibbons (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1985), p. 91.
Allan Megill, Prophets of Extremity: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), p. 260.
Derrida, ‘The Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences’, in The Structuralist Controversy: the Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man, ed. Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University, 1970), p. 404.
John Carlos Rowe, ‘Surplus Economies: Deconstruction, Ideology, and the Humanities’, in The Aims of Representation: Subject/Text/History, ed. Murray Krieger (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), p. 134.
Derrida, ‘The Conflict of Faculties: a Mochlos’, trans. Cynthia Chase, Jonathan Culler, Irving Wohlfarth (New York: Columbia University lecture, 1980). Quoted in Vincent B. Leitch, ‘Deconstruction and Pedagogy’, p. 47.
Michael Ryan, Marxism and Deconstruction: A Critical Articulation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University, 1982), p. xv.
Barbara Johnson, The Critical Difference: Essays in the Contemporary Rhetoric of Reading (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), pp. x-xi.
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© 1992 Marcel Cornis-Pop
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Cornis-Pope, M. (1992). The Figure of Catachresis and the Plot of Unreadability in Deconstruction. In: Hermeneutic Desire and Critical Rewriting. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230371378_3
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