deconstructive criticismby vincent b. leitch

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South Atlantic Modern Language Association Deconstructive Criticism by Vincent B. Leitch Review by: Gregory Jay South Atlantic Review, Vol. 48, No. 4 (Nov., 1983), pp. 74-77 Published by: South Atlantic Modern Language Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3199672 . Accessed: 25/06/2014 02:17 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. . South Atlantic Modern Language Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to South Atlantic Review. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 185.2.32.60 on Wed, 25 Jun 2014 02:17:35 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

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Page 1: Deconstructive Criticismby Vincent B. Leitch

South Atlantic Modern Language Association

Deconstructive Criticism by Vincent B. LeitchReview by: Gregory JaySouth Atlantic Review, Vol. 48, No. 4 (Nov., 1983), pp. 74-77Published by: South Atlantic Modern Language AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3199672 .

Accessed: 25/06/2014 02:17

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

South Atlantic Modern Language Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extendaccess to South Atlantic Review.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 185.2.32.60 on Wed, 25 Jun 2014 02:17:35 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Page 2: Deconstructive Criticismby Vincent B. Leitch

Book Reviews JEAN-PIERRE PIRIOU (Foreign Languages)

SHIRLEY STRUM KENNY (English/American)

zDeconstructive Criticism. By Vincent B. Leitch. New York: Colum- bia University Press, 1982. 267 pp. $25.00 ($8.95 paperback).

Deconstructive Criticism: An Advanced Introduction is in some ways the best of the recent guidebooks to the subject. Students and scholars seeking an explanation for all the current fuss over signi- fiers, traces, discourses, and aporias will find Leitch's survey both informative and provocative. Those completely new to the field

may experience confusion as Leitch moves rapidly through the

speculations of over fifteen major critics and thinkers. The preface warns that this is "not a smooth narrative" but rather a "tapestry" of often contradictory theories arranged to unsettle instead of comfort our conventional expectations. "Patterned like a history of ideas," we are told, "the book approximates a spiral as it regularly returns to significant concepts, texts, and figures." The genre of this study is "metacriticism," and so Leitch rightly allows himself to practice a bit of the deconstructive strategy and style his exem-

plary critics preach. On the other hand, this sometimes annoying indulgence of "creative criticism" is balanced by a shrewd and

logical selection of materials, beginning with the structuralist en-

terprise, reviewing Derrida's challenge to it, and assessing a vari-

ety of theorists now working in the wake of deconstruction. The pattern of this tapestry is roughly historical, beginning with

the impact of structural linguistics on psychoanalysis and anthro-

pology. In the work of Saussure, Lacan, and Levi-Strauss semio-

logy-the study of sign systems-emerges as the characteristic concern of structuralism. Stable sets of objects, references, and

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Page 3: Deconstructive Criticismby Vincent B. Leitch

South Atlantic Review

meanings give way to a study of how language produces, through its differential relations, what we later take to be essences and identities. As Leitch shows, Derrida initiates deconstruction as a

critique of structuralist theories of the sign, relentlessly uncovering the metaphysical premises still informing this supposedly demysti- fied methodology. Thus we see that the name "deconstruction" is an oxymoronic nominative, since it signals a radical questioning of the identities we create with language. Derrida finds that structur- alism forecloses much of the relativity and play implied by its own model. This binding of differences in a fixed hierarchical order, centered around some privileged truth, Derrida calls logocentrism. Thus Leitch brings us to see a crucial double movement in decon- struction: it is an historically determined reaction against structur- alist views of language and culture, but structuralism is only the most recent embodiment of that ineluctable logocentrism that

recurrently dominates Western thought. Leitch must then take us on to deconstructive theories of writing as textuality, for textuality ahistorically precedes the logocentric production of names, books, authors, eras, and history itself: "Writing, in this new and ex- tended sense, signifies any practice of differentiation, articulation, and spacing." Thus forest paths, kinship systems, psychoanalysis, and philosophy are primordially acts of writing.

For the literary critic, the work becomes a text in the sense of a network of signifying possibilities that precedes and exceeds any interpretive closure into a proper or authorized meaning. Of course, to read is always to decide, and so deconstruction must borrow the tools of traditional criticism even as it dismantles them. This is "double writing," the act of inscribing within an analytical commentary an allegory of that commentary's subversion by its own efforts. Deconstructive criticism, Derrida tells us, always falls

prey to its own work, and so resists either the delusion of liberation or the fantasy of absolute knowledge.

"As a mode of textual theory and analysis," Leitch writes, "contemporary deconstruction subverts almost everything in the tradition, putting in question received ideas of the sign and lan-

guage, the text, the context, the author, the reader, the role of

history, the work of interpretation, and the forms of critical writ- ing." This summary represents the astonishingly broad itinerary of Leitch's survey of poststructuralist criticism. Especially original and noteworthy are his chapters on textuality and intertextuality, including a lucid section on Heidegger and detailed analyses of work by William Spanos and Joseph Riddel. A chapter on "The

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Page 4: Deconstructive Criticismby Vincent B. Leitch

(Inter) Textualization of Context" follows, where sections on Hay- den White, Harold Bloom, Michel Foucault, and Derrida explore the difficult question of the extent to which textuality exceeds all borders and becomes a global ecriture. Part three of Leitch's study turns to examine the different deconstructive strategies of Paul de Man, J. Hillis Miller, and Geoffrey Hartman, and of such decon- structive books as Roland Barthes's S/Z, Derrida's Glas, and De- leuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus. This is the book's weakest section, for it tries to do too much too quickly. These pages also suffer from an excess of those stylistic infelicities that elsewhere dot the book. The flippant tone, demotic diction, and irregular syntax are often more clumsy than artful. The cause of creative criticism is set back by such lines as, "Glas has and eats its dadaistic cake."

Deconstructive Criticism will inevitably be compared to Chris-

topher Norris's Deconstruction: Theory and Practice and Jonathan Culler's On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism since Structuralism. Each has unique merits and a perceptibly different agenda. Norris's little book is eclectic, though it covers the canonical

passages from Of Grammatology and Derrida's critiques of pheno- menology and structuralism. Nietzsche and Marx receive ample coverage here, in stark contrast to their passing mention by Culler and Leitch. Norris's "American Connection" extends only as far as New Haven. Culler's primer is deceptively sub-titled, being the least wide ranging of the three in its coverage of poststructuralism. Leitch preserves the strangeness and radical force of deconstruc- tion, while Culler's common sense lucidity so expertly packages Derrida's work that one wonders what the fuss was all about. Readers will doubtless appreciate Culler's unsurpassed clarity as he paraphrases Derrida, but they will end up with a very narrow canon of deconstructive criticism. Leitch is more catholic and

daring in his coverage of recent theorists. Culler's chapter on recent American criticism spends an inordinate time on a few

essays before giving way to the overwhelming example of Paul de Man. One comes away from Leitch's book with a less secure, less

limited, and less comforting understanding of deconstruction. The major weakness of Leitch's book, however, is its avowed

"neutrality." While Norris entertains a variety of alternatives to deconstruction, and Culler promotes a theory of deconstruction as

reader-response criticism, Leitch's last sentence declares "This book offers no conclusion." However ingeniously staged, this disclaimer is disingenuous, since the book's method and style do

Reviews 76

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Page 5: Deconstructive Criticismby Vincent B. Leitch

South Atlantic Review South Atlantic Review

manifest conclusions about deconstructive criticism. In the place of the wholly unnecessary recapitulation that preempts the book's final twenty pages, we could have used an assessment of the future, however "monstrous." Can deconstruction continue to fend off the objections of Marxists and feminists? What are the implications of deconstruction for the institution and profession of literary study? How will deconstruction alter our curriculums and pedagogy? What historical relation obtains between deconstructive criticism and contemporary movements in poetry, fiction, and the other arts? These are some of the questions Leitch should have tackled, but it is achievement enough if he has helped us pose them in an informed and intelligent manner.

Gregory Jay, University of Alabama

rThe Festive Play of Fernando Arrabal. By Luis Oscar Arata. Lexing- ton: University Press of Kentucky, 1982. 104 pp. $9.50.

Fernando Arrabal, who has been living in France since the age of twenty-three, is the author of many "episodic" plays which Arata, in his very fine study on this Spanish-born playwright, so rightly labels "fractured." What is both innovative and arresting in Arata's volume is the fact that he traces the history of "that other region of theatre where the discontinuous prevails and the unexpected can remain as such." Episodic theatre is not new with Arrabal. It prevailed in Old Attic tragedy and comedy, in the works of Aeschylus, Aristophanes, the Medieval mystery, the miracle plays, Goethe's Faust, Flaubert's Tentation de Saint-Antoine, and today in such works as Beckett's Waiting for Godot. To overindulge in disconnected forms in theatre, however, without having recourse to organizing structures, might serve to lose the spectator in a dazzling, but utterly confusing panoply of extraneous images. Arrabal avoids this pitfall, Arata suggests, by grouping his discon- nected episodes "within a simple pattern or basic structure with which the audience is familiar," namely, the allegory, myth, inver- sion, cycles, repetition, ritual, thereby enabling the audience to follow with relative ease.

Arata's study of Arrabal's unplotted episodic plays focuses on pre-1972 works. These are more spontaneous and certainly, in my view, far more entertaining than the later dramas which are contrived, repetitious and so utterly banal.

manifest conclusions about deconstructive criticism. In the place of the wholly unnecessary recapitulation that preempts the book's final twenty pages, we could have used an assessment of the future, however "monstrous." Can deconstruction continue to fend off the objections of Marxists and feminists? What are the implications of deconstruction for the institution and profession of literary study? How will deconstruction alter our curriculums and pedagogy? What historical relation obtains between deconstructive criticism and contemporary movements in poetry, fiction, and the other arts? These are some of the questions Leitch should have tackled, but it is achievement enough if he has helped us pose them in an informed and intelligent manner.

Gregory Jay, University of Alabama

rThe Festive Play of Fernando Arrabal. By Luis Oscar Arata. Lexing- ton: University Press of Kentucky, 1982. 104 pp. $9.50.

Fernando Arrabal, who has been living in France since the age of twenty-three, is the author of many "episodic" plays which Arata, in his very fine study on this Spanish-born playwright, so rightly labels "fractured." What is both innovative and arresting in Arata's volume is the fact that he traces the history of "that other region of theatre where the discontinuous prevails and the unexpected can remain as such." Episodic theatre is not new with Arrabal. It prevailed in Old Attic tragedy and comedy, in the works of Aeschylus, Aristophanes, the Medieval mystery, the miracle plays, Goethe's Faust, Flaubert's Tentation de Saint-Antoine, and today in such works as Beckett's Waiting for Godot. To overindulge in disconnected forms in theatre, however, without having recourse to organizing structures, might serve to lose the spectator in a dazzling, but utterly confusing panoply of extraneous images. Arrabal avoids this pitfall, Arata suggests, by grouping his discon- nected episodes "within a simple pattern or basic structure with which the audience is familiar," namely, the allegory, myth, inver- sion, cycles, repetition, ritual, thereby enabling the audience to follow with relative ease.

Arata's study of Arrabal's unplotted episodic plays focuses on pre-1972 works. These are more spontaneous and certainly, in my view, far more entertaining than the later dramas which are contrived, repetitious and so utterly banal.

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