Deconstruction and Criticism [Book Review]

Review of Metaphysics 36 (3):690-692 (1983)
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Abstract

This collection of essays by five scholars whose views were mutually shaped in several years of association at Yale attempts to define deconstruction and its place in criticism from a philosophical standpoint. Though the definition is not easily got at, the volume does provide some important insights into the purpose and future of criticism. "Deconstruction" is a way of reading that holds in tension the contradictory evidence of a romantic criticism, which asserts the primacy of the author's mind over his material, and of semiotics, which asserts the priority of linguistic codes over any rational or imaginative determination of meaning, thereby undermining claims to causality or intuitive truth. Thus, the authors here can remain in contact with the romantic mode even after having rigorously shown it to be untenable. Eschewing pure structuralism, these essays demonstrate a continuing commitment to the integrity of the literary text, not out of a misguided aestheticism but because of the manifest inability of analysis to resolve the contradictions that engender the text.

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