Comp. Lit. 89000 - Deconstruction: Its Roots and Ramifications Prof. Brenkman

The work of Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man marked a new convergence of American and European criticism, significantly transformed the landscape of literary studies, prompted numerous debates, and has left a controversial legacy in contemporary literary and aesthetic theory. This seminar will be devoted to the sources and consequences of deconstruction. We will examine the genealogy of deconstructive criticism in the American New Criticism and the Geneva School, in Nietzsche and Heidegger, in Benjamin, and in the avatars of romanticism in European literature and thought. Early texts by Derrida and de Man’s writings, from early to late, will be the principal focus. The innovations in strategies of reading and in approaches to figurative language in literary texts will be explored in order to evaluate deconstruction’s contribution to critical methods. The impact of deconstruction—whether as influence or agon—will allow participants in the seminar to probe its ramifications for the new historicism, the later Frankfurt School, poststructuralism, queer theory, and post-Marxism. Principal texts will be Derrida’s Of Grammatology and Dissemination and de Man’s Blindness and Insight, Allegories of Reading, and The Rhetoric of Romanticism as well as some later essays.