Deconstruction & The Yale School – Deconstruction in Practice

1. Paper N/o., Subject Code, Name : 204 : 22409 :
Contemporary Western Theories and Film Studies
Prepared by : Nirav Amreliya
Ro. N/o. : 18
Dated on : 6th October, 2022
Batch :2021 – 2023 (M.A. Sem.3)
Enrollment Number : 4069206420210002
Submitted to : Smt. Sujata Binoy Gardi Department of English,
Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University - Bhavnagar
Deconstruction & The Yale
School – Deconstruction in
Practice

2.  The Yale School of Criticism
:
 The “Yale School” is the term commonly used to describe the work of five
outstanding scholars – Harold Bloom, Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, Geoffrey
Hartman, and J. Hillis Miller – located in the departments of French and
Comparative Literature, and of English, at Yale University between 1972 and
1986.
 It is often referred to as the Yale School of deconstruction or even as
“American deconstruction” in general.
 While de Man used the term “deconstruction” and both Derrida and Miller
remained aligned with this term throughout their writing, the connection
between Bloom and Hartman and deconstruction is less obvious.
 The only significant volume produced by the Yale quintet together is the
collection of essays Deconstruction and Criticism (Bloom et al. 1979), in which
each critic contributes an essay on Shelley's “The triumph of life.” (Mcquillan)

3. 1. Harold Bloom
:
 Harold Bloom (July 11, 1930 – October 14, 2019) was an American
literary critic and the Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale
University.
 Harold Bloom’s ‘The Anxiety of Influence’ has cast its own long
shadow of influence since it was first published in 1973.
 Through an insightful study of Romantic poets, Bloom puts forth his
central vision of the relations between tradition and the individual
artist.
 Bloom asserts that the anxiety of influence comes out of a complex
act of strong misreading, a creative interpretation he calls “poetic
misprision.” The influence-anxiety does not so much concern the
forerunner but rather is an anxiety achieved in and by the story, novel,
play, poem, or essay.
 In other words, without Keats’s reading of Shakespeare, Milton, and
Wordsworth, we could not have Keats’s odes and sonnets and his

4. 2. Paul de Man
:
 Paul de Man (December 6, 1919 – December 21, 1983), born Paul Adolph Michel
Deman, was a Belgian-born literary critic and literary theorist. At the time of his death, de
Man was one of the most prominent literary critics in the United States—known particularly
for his importation of German and French philosophical approaches into Anglo-American
literary studies and critical theory.
 The main argument of de Man’s seminal essay can be stated as follows: The grounds of
literary meaning (and by extension all meaning) must be located in rhetoric rather than in
any of the other possible dimensions (form, content, reference, grammar, logic etc.). But a
rhetorical reading cannot guarantee authority over interpretations. Therefore there is no
authority that can guarantee a reading. This doesn’t license us to read a text just anyway we
want to. Rather it commits us to readings that take full account of the possibilities and
limits of reading (and writing) generally. One name for these possibilities and limits might
be ‘deconstruction.’
 de Man begins by noting a decline in what he calls “formalist and intrinsic criticism.”
 Semiology establishes some basic tenets: the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign, the
system of differences that gives the sign its value, and the conventional codes that operate as
prompts for signification, sometimes making it seem rather culture bound. (Phillips)
- Essay (1973)

5. 3. Jacques Derrida
:
 Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) was the founder of “deconstruction,” a way of
criticizing not only both literary and philosophical texts but also political institutions.
Although Derrida at times expressed regret concerning the fate of the word
“deconstruction,” its popularity indicates the wide-ranging influence of his thought, in
philosophy, in literary criticism and theory, in art and, in particular, architectural
theory, and in political theory.
 Derrida usually changes the term’s orthography, for example, writing “différence”
with an “a” as “différance” in order to indicate the change in its status. Différance
(which is found in appearances when we recognize their temporal nature) then refers to
the undecidable resource into which “metaphysics” “cut” in order to makes its
decision.
 In his 1993 ‘Specters of Marx,’ where Derrida insisted that a deconstructed (or
criticized) Marxist thought is still relevant to today’s world despite globalization and
that a deconstructed Marxism consists in a new messianism, a messianism of a
“democracy to come.”
 "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences" was a lecture
presented at Johns Hopkins University on 21 October 1966 by philosopher Jacques
Derrida. The lecture was then published in 1967 as chapter ten of ‘Writing and
• “Language bears within itself the
necessity of its own critique.”
• Derrida states that,
“the mark of the
absence of a presence,
an always already
absent present, of the
lack at the origin that
is the condition of
thought and
experience.” (Baker)

6. 4. Geoffrey Hartman
:
 Geoffrey H. Hartman, (born August 11, 1929, Frankfurt-am-Main, Germany—died March 14,
2016, Hamden, Connecticut, U.S.), German-born American literary critic and theorist who opposed Anglo-American
formalism, brought Continental thought to North American literary criticism, and championed criticism as a creative
act.
 Hartman advocates the use of incomplete references, and seeks a critical language that is highly figurative and
critical at the same time.
 Hartman is completely textual in his orientation (as indicated in the title of one of his several books ‘Saving the
Text’), preferring to laboriously explicate the literary work rather than connect the work to politics or institutions.
 Hartman regards criticism as inside literature, best argued in his essay ‘Crossing Over: Literary Commentary as
Literature.’ He argues that critical reading should not seek meaning but should reveal the contradictions and
equivocations in a text.
 Hartman rejects the “death of the subject” and the idea of unlimited freeplay. For Hartman the Derridean notion of
the completely undecidable is unacceptable. (Mambrol)
 He argues that : “In literature, as much as in life, the simplest event can resonate mysteriously, be invested with
aura, and tend toward the symbolic. The symbolic, in this sense, is not a denial of literal or referential but its uncanny
intensification […] In short we get a clearer view of the relation of literature to mental functioning in several key

7. 5. Joseph Hillis Miller
:
 The prominent Yale critic, J. Hillis Miller’s concept ‘The Critic as a Host’ that he proposed
in journal ‘Critical Inquiry,’ third volume published in 1977 could be viewed as a reply to
M.H. Abrams ‘The Deconstructive Angel,’ which he presented at a session of the Modern
Language-Association in December 1976, criticizing deconstruction and the methods of
Miller.
 In his essay Abrams had argued that there is a fixed univocal meaning for a text and if we
use deconstructive strategies History will become an impossibility. Miller replied that
univocal and determinate meaning is an impossibility as history also is.
 Miller begins the essay with a crucial question: when a text contains a citation from another
text, is it like a parasite in the main text or is it the main text that surrounds and strangles the
citation? Many people tend to see the deconstructionist reading as a parasite on its host, the
univocal reading.
 The word “parasite” evokes the image of an ivy tree, the deconstructive reading that feeds
on a mighty masculine oak, the univocal reading, and finally destroys the host. Miller rejects
this view and calls this image inappropriate. He undertakes a brilliant etymological
investigation of the words “parasite” and “host” to show that they contain many contradictory
meanings in them. Thus Miller proves that each word has a reciprocal, antithetical meaning

8. Deconstruction
:
 Deconstruction was both created and has been profoundly influenced by the French
philosopher Jacques Derrida. Derrida, who coined the term deconstruction, argues that
in Western culture, people tend to think and express their thoughts in terms of binary
oppositions (white / black, masculine / feminine, cause /effect, conscious /unconscious,
presence / absence, speech writing). Derrida suggests these oppositions are hierarchies
in miniature, containing one term that Western culture views as positive or superior and
another considered negative or inferior, even if only slightly so. Through
deconstruction, Derrida aims to erase the boundary between binary oppositions—and to
do so in such a way that the hierarchy implied by the oppositions is thrown into
question.
 Deconstruction involves the close reading of texts in order to demonstrate that any
given text has irreconcilably contradictory meanings, rather than being a unified, logical
whole.
 As J. Hillis Miller, the preeminent American deconstructionist, has explained in an
essay entitled ‘Stevens’ Rock and Criticism as Cure’ (1976), “Deconstruction is not a
dismantling of the structure of a text, but a demonstration that it has already dismantled
itself. Its apparently solid ground is no rock but thin air.” (Mambrol)
• Of Grammatology,1967

9. Deconstruction in Practice
:
 Here is a verse or ‘Shloka’ from Bhagavad Geeta which is helpful in understanding the feminine
place in history and taken in order to do a deconstructive reading concerned with historical as well
as mythical social values :
|| म ां हि प र्थ व्यप हित्य येऽहप स्यु: प पयोनय: |
स्त्रियो वैश्य स्तर् शूद्र स्तेऽहप य स्त्रि पर ां गहिम् || (B.G. 9.32)
O son of Påthä, those who take shelter in Me, though
they be of lower birth—women, vaiçyas [merchants]
and çüdras [workers]—can attain the supreme
destination.
 Prabhupada writes in his purport of seventh
shloka of sixteenth chapter of ‘Bhagavad Geeta As
It Is’ : “Now, in the Manusamhita it is clearly stated
that a woman should not be given
freedom…Actually, a woman should be given
protection at every stage of life. She should be
given protection by the father in her younger days,
by the husband in her youth, and by the grownup
sons in her old age. This is proper social behaviour
according to the Manusamhita. But modern
education has artificially devised a puffed-up
concept of womanly life, and therefore marriage is
practically now an imagination in human society…”
(Prabhupada)
 Simone De Beauvoir echoes different in her ‘The Second
Sex’ (1949) : “Few tasks are more like the torture of
Sisyphus than housework, with its endless repetition: the
clean becomes soiled, the soiled is made clean, over and
over, day after day.” (Taylor)

10.  “To be feminine is to show oneself as weak, futile, passive, and
docile. The girl is supposed not only to primp and dress herself up but
also to repress her spontaneity and substitute for it the grace and
charm she has been taught by her elder sisters. Any self-assertion will
take away from her femininity and her seductiveness.” (Taylor)
 “The curse which lies upon marriage is that too often the
individuals are joined in their weakness rather than in their strength,
each asking from the other instead of finding pleasure in giving.”
(Taylor)
 More quotations from ‘The Second Sex’ (1949) by Simone de Beauvoir :
 “Woman is shut up in a kitchen or in a boudoir, and
astonishment is expressed that her horizon is limited. Her
wings are clipped, and it is found deplorable that she cannot
fly. Let but the future be opened to her, and she will no
longer be compelled to linger in the present.” (Taylor)
 “To catch a husband is an art; to hold him is a job.”
(Taylor)

11. o Works Cited :
 Baker, Jessica. The Agency of Absence. http://fetliu.net/abemagazine/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2017/10/Jessica-Baker-ACS-
Essay.pdf.
 Bloom, Harold. “The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry.” English, 1 Apr. 1997, https://english.yale.edu/publications/anxiety-
influence-theory-poetry.
 Goarzin, Anne. “Articulating Trauma.” Études Irlandaises, Presses Universitaires De Rennes, 10 Feb. 2012,
https://journals.openedition.org/etudesirlandaises/2116#bodyftn5.
 Lawlor, Leonard. “Jacques Derrida.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Stanford University, 27 Aug. 2021,
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/derrida/.
 Mambrol, Nasrullah. “Deconstruction.” Literary Theory and Criticism, 12 Sept. 2019, https://literariness.org/2016/03/22/deconstruction/.
 Mambrol, Nasrullah. “Hillis Miller's Concept of Critic as Host.” Literary Theory and Criticism, 17 Aug. 2019,
https://literariness.org/2016/03/18/hillis-millers-concept-of-critic-as-host/.
 Mambrol, Nasrullah. “Key Theories of Geoffrey Hartman.” Literary Theory and Criticism, 27 June 2017,
https://literariness.org/2016/12/01/key-theories-of-geoffrey-hartman/.
 Phillips, John. “Form and Content.” Paul De Man's "Semiology and Rhetoric", https://courses.nus.edu.sg/course/elljwp/deman.htm.
 Prabhupada, A. C Bhaktivedanta Swami. Bhagavad-Gītā as It Is: With the Original Sanskrit Text, Roman Transliteration, English
Equivalents, Translation, and Elaborate Purports. Bhaktivedanta Book Trust, 2015.
 Taylor, J. (2020, December 3). 17 feminist quotes from the second sex by Simone de Beauvoir. Literary Ladies Guide. Retrieved
October 6, 2022, from https://www.literaryladiesguide.com/author-quotes/17-feminist-quotes-from-second-sex-simone-de-beauvoir/