Yale school (deconstruction)

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The "Yale school" is a colloquial name for an influential group of literary critics, theorists, and philosophers, all influenced by Jacques Derrida's philosophy of deconstruction, who were together at Yale University in the 1970s.

During the period between the late 1960s and the early 1980s many thinkers influenced by deconstruction, including Paul de Man, Geoffrey Hartman, J. Hillis Miller, and Harold Bloom, worked at Yale University. This group came to be known as the Yale school and was especially influential in literary criticism, as de Man, Miller, and Hartman were all primarily literary critics. The four critics listed above, along with Derrida, contributed to an influential anthology, Deconstruction and Criticism. Several of these theorists were subsequently affiliated with the University of California at Irvine.

There are, however, marked distinctions between the different critics associated with the Yale School. In his introduction to Deconstruction and Criticism, Hartman draws a distinction between Derrida, Miller, and de Man on the one hand, and himself and Bloom on the other. The former category he refers to as "boa-deconstructors, merciless and consequent," ^[1] critics who pursue deconstruction to its utmost conclusions, and who are more philosophically rigorous in their writings and in the protocols and gestures which they employ. Hartman claims that both himself and Bloom are "barely decontructionists, they even write against it on occasion."^[2] Hartman and Bloom differ vastly both in their style of writing, (which often involves philosophical rhapsodizing which is in stark contrast to de Man's surgical style) ^[3] and in their trajectory of criticism, which, Hartman claims, is more reliant on the traditional role of pathos as a fundamental impetus for literary language. In contrast, deconstruction seeks to reveal that the very notion of pathos is caught up in the rhetorical play which is endemic to language.

[edit] References

^ Bloom, Harold, et. al. Deconstruction and Criticism (New York: Continuum, 1979), ix.
^ Deconstruction and Criticism, ix.
^ See Norris, Christopher, Deconstruction, Theory and Practice (London: Routledge, 1982), 100.

[edit] Further Reading

(1983) Jonathan Arac, Wlad Godzich, Wallace Martin, editors. The Yale Critics: Deconstruction in America. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ISBN 0-8166-1201-3, ISBN 0-8166-1206-4.
(1985) Robert Con Davis and Ronald Schleifer, editors. Rhetoric and Form: Deconstruction at Yale. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, ISBN 0-8061-1895-4.