Deconstruction was nothing if not controversial. Was the approach to reading texts a foreign agent, a Trojan Horse, directed to destroy literary education from within? Was it a nihilistic bomb set at the heart of humanistic study? Did it irrationally, to excess, focus on language, undermining Western culture and thought? In this intellectual history, Gregory Jones-Katz historicizes the deconstructive movement, which has been misunderstood, mischaracterized, and left for dead—even as its principles and influence transformed literary studies and a host of other fields in the humanities. Beginnin ... More

Deconstruction was nothing if not controversial. Was the approach to reading texts a foreign agent, a Trojan Horse, directed to destroy literary education from within? Was it a nihilistic bomb set at the heart of humanistic study? Did it irrationally, to excess, focus on language, undermining Western culture and thought? In this intellectual history, Gregory Jones-Katz historicizes the deconstructive movement, which has been misunderstood, mischaracterized, and left for dead—even as its principles and influence transformed literary studies and a host of other fields in the humanities. Beginning before Jacques Derrida’s deconstructive work at Johns Hopkins University in 1966, Jones-Katz unearths an array of intellectual and institutional settings to show how a group of literary critics instituted deconstruction during the sixties. Deconstruction continues through several decades of theoretic growth and tumult, with much of the story focusing on Yale University and the curriculum and personalities—Paul de Man, Harold Bloom, Geoffrey Hartman, J. Hillis Miller, and others—lumped under the “Yale School” umbrella. While examining de Man and company’s challenges to the sacred and scientific values that shaped literary education, Jones-Katz also makes clear how central feminism and gender studies also were to the lifeblood of this mode of thought. At the same time, he illustrates that deconstruction in the United States—so often caricatured as a French infection—was truly an American institution, emerging within our preexisting political and intellectual tensions, and permeating unexpected corners of scholarship, politics, and culture.