Theory at Yale

The Strange Case of Deconstruction in America

by Marc Redfield

This title was previously available on NetGalley and is now archived.

Buy on Amazon Buy on BN.com Buy on Bookshop.org

*This page contains affiliate links, so we may earn a small commission when you make a purchase through links on our site at no additional cost to you.

Pub Date Nov 02 2015 | Archive Date Oct 01 2015

Description

This book examines the affinity between "theory" and "deconstruction" that developed in the American academy in the 1970s by way of the "Yale Critics": Harold Bloom, Paul de Man, Geoffrey Hartman, and J. Hillis Miller, sometimes joined by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida.

With this semi-fictional collective, theory became a media event, first in the academy and then in the wider print media, in and through its phantasmatic link with deconstruction and with "Yale." The important role played by aesthetic humanism in American pedagogical discourse provides a context for understanding theory as an aesthetic scandal, and an examination of the ways in which de Man's work challenges aesthetic pieties helps us understand why, by the 1980s, he above all had come to personify "theory."

Combining a broad account of the "Yale Critics" phenomenon with a series of careful re-examinations of the event of theory, Redfield traces the threat posed by language's unreliability and inhumanity in chapters on lyric, on Hartman's representation of the Wordsworthian imagination, on Bloom's early theory of influence in the 1970s together with his later media reinvention as the genius of the Western Canon, and on John Guillory's influential attempt to interpret de Manian theory as a symptom of literature's increasing marginality. A final chapter examines Mark Tansey's paintings "Derrida Queries de Man" and "Constructing the Grand Canyon", works that offer subtle, complex reflections on the peculiar event of theory as-deconstruction in America.

Advance Praise

“This is the most informative and accurate book I have read, or ever expect to read, on the ‘Yale Critics’ phenomenon. It’s completely free of both the bad faith and the idolatry that plague any and all other accounts.”—Paul Fry, Yale University

“Was the Yale School a media creation? Marc Redfield here offers us both a shrewd account of the quite different contributions of Geoffrey Hartman, Harold Bloom, and Paul de Man to literary studies, and a smart, subtle, analysis of the myth of the ‘Yale School’ and its fortunes in the culture wars. An invigorating retrospective on an important chapter in American intellectual history which is not yet over.”
—Jonathan Culler, Cornell University

Available Editions

EDITION	Other Format
ISBN	9780823268672
PRICE	$29.95 (USD)

Additional Information

Average rating from 4 members

Featured Reviews

Earl M, Reviewer

In Marc Redfield's Theory at Yale we are given an examination of the Yale critics who were lumped together in spite of their differences at a time when theory, namely deconstruction, became popular in the United States.

Redfield treats this loosely grouped collective (Harold Bloom, Paul de Man, Geoffrey Hartman, and J. Hillis Miller, sometimes joined by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida) individually with an eye toward what created the popular impression of an actual cohesion. Depending on your interest there is likely something here for anyone with an interest in 'theory' and particularly with the history and popularization of (de Manian) deconstruction in the United States.

For those who like Bloom his chapter is quite good. My interest was primarily in the chapter on de Man and also the last one on Mark Tansey's paintings. Redfield's text is very readable and his explanations of both theory and its contextualization are accessible to most readers whether they have a 'theory' background or not.

In addition to the types of readers I mentioned above, those with an interest in the academy (particularly the humanities) as an institution or in language and its (un)reliability will also find much of interest.

Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.