5.5 The Yale School of Deconstruction

   Though Derrida wrote occasionally on literature, his primary focus was on the classical texts of Western philosophical tradition starting from Plato onwards. Most of his important statements on literature are collected in the book Acts of Literature.  However, ‘deconstruction’ became popular in literary criticism largely due to the literary theorists and scholars associated with the Yale School like Paul de Man, Geoffrey Hartman, J. Hillis Miller, and Harold Bloom. One of the most important practitioners Paul de Man (1919–83) in ‘The Resistance to Theory’ says that the rhetorical and figurative dimension of language makes it an unreliable medium for communication of truths. Literary language being predominantly rhetorical and figurative, to take for granted that literature is a reliable source of information about anything but itself would be a great mistake. This gives rise to a particular crisis in literary studies because "literariness" is no longer seen as an aesthetic quality nor is it seen as a mimetic mode. As we consider language as an intuitive and transparent medium, as opposed to the material and conventional medium that it is, aesthetic effect, according to de Man, takes place because we tend to mistake the materiality of the signifier with the materiality of the signified. Mimesis, like aesthetic quality, is also an effect of the rhetorical and figurative aspects of language. The assumption of ideological and historical contexts or backgrounds to literary texts becomes problematic if language is no longer seen as a transparent and intuitive guide from the textual material to the historical situation. Consequently, the theorists who uphold an aesthetic approach to literary studies and those who uphold a historical approach both find deconstructive approach inconvenient and challenging.    De Man practiced his own variety of deconstruction in his philosophically oriented literary criticism of Romanticism, especially the writings of William Wordsworth, John Keats, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Friedrich Nietzsche, Immanuel Kant, G.W.F. Hegel, William Butler Yeats, Friedrich Holderlin and Rainer Maria Rilke. In Blindness and Insight, de Man sought to deconstruct the privileging of symbol over allegory and metaphor over metonymy in Romantic thought. In Romantic philosophy, metaphor implied self-identity and wholeness, decomposition of self-identity implied inability of overcoming the dualism between subject and object, which Romantic metaphor sought to transcend. To compensate for this inability, de Man argued that the Romanticism constantly relies on allegory to attain the wholeness established by the totality of the symbol.