Volume 27, Number 10 · June 12, 1980
Deconstructing Deconstruction
By Denis Donoghue
Deconstruction and Criticism
by Harold Bloom, by Paul de Man, by Jacques Derrida, by Geoffrey H. Hartman, by J. Hillis Miller
Seabury Press, 256 pp., $8.95 (paper)
Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust
by Paul de Man
Yale University Press, 305 pp., $19.50
For the past forty or fifty years, teachers of literature in American colleges and universities have acted upon a few simple assumptions, mainly derived from I.A. Richards's early books Principles of Literary Criticism (1924) and Practical Criticism (1929). The first assumption is that in reading a poem you think of the words on the page as a transcription of a voice speaking; not necessarily the poet speaking in his own person, but a hypothetical person, speaking in imagined circumstances sufficiently indicated by what he says. The second assumption is that you are interpreting the poem, trying to understand the context, the speaker's sense of it, and the cogency of that sense. The meaning of the poem is what the speaker means to say. The third assumption is that you read poems to imagine experiences you have not had, to exercise sympathy and judgment upon them, and to take part in richer communications. It follows that it is essential, in reading a poem as in taking part in a conversation, to judge the speaker's tone correctly, because tone indicates his relation both to his own feeling and to the person or persons he is addressing. These assumptions, suitably elaborated, prescribe an orthodoxy of reading.
Review, 4887 words
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