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Deconstruction: Theory and Practice has been acclaimed as by far the most readable, concise and authoritative guide to this topic. Without oversimplifying or glossing over the challenges, Norris makes deconstruction more accessible to the reader. The volume focuses on the works of Jacques Derrida which caused this seismic shift in critical thought, as well as the work of North American critics Paul de Man, Geoffrey Hartman, J. Hillis Miller and Harold Bloom. In this third, revised edition, Norris builds on his 1991 Afterword with an entirely new Postscript, reflecting upon recent critical debate. The Postscript includes an extensive list of recommended reading, complementing what was already one of the most useful bibliographies available.… (más)
Published in the heyday of the American reception of deconstruction, Norris' book is a good, if somewhat dated (before Derrida's "ethical/political turn"), introduction to deconstruction, with an emphasis on its role in 20th century evolution of literary theory and criticism. Norris provides a lucid, sympathetic and mostly accurate, if occasionally (and he admits as much) simplifying, account of Derrida's work up to that point, including a bit on his relation to Heidegger and Husserl.
Much of the book is dedicated to providing an overview of the American reception of Derrida's work and its relation to main trends in American literary theory and criticism, specifically structuralism, New Criticism, and Marxist criticism. Norris clearly has his favourites among Derrida's American heirs: Paul de Man is repeatedly lauded for his rigour, while certain others come in for some minor censure for going too far into the sort of rhapsodic flights of imagination and whimsy that deconstruction can sometimes be taken to legitimate. But his criticism and praise avoid both fawning and the histrionics that deconstruction has sometimes inspired in its detractors.
If you are looking for a philosophical introduction to Derrida's work, this is not it, but that is clearly not its aim. ( )
Información procedente del conocimiento común inglés.Edita para encontrar en tu idioma.
Literature as well as criticism – the difference between them being delusive – is condemned (or privileged) to be forever the most rigorous and, consequently, the most unreliable language in terms of which man names and transforms himself. (de Man 1979, p. 19)
This sentence by the critic Paul de Man is a fair sample of the kind of thinking about literature which is currently termed deconstruction. It bristles with the sort of paradox which that thinking finds at work not only in literary texts but in criticism, philosophy and all varieties of discourse, its own included. What can it mean to reject the distinction between literature and criticism as merely delusion? How can a language be at once the most ‘rigorous’ and the most ‘unreliable’ source of knowledge? In what conceivable sense can man ‘transform’ himself through a process of naming somehow made possible by this rigorous unreliability? These are not problems that either resolve themselves on a more careful reading or simply settle down (like religious belief) into a system of self-supporting paradox. Rather they operate, as more than one disgruntled critic has remarked of de Man, as a positive technique for making trouble; an affront to every normal and comfortable habit of thought.
[From the Introduction]
To present ‘deconstruction’ as if it were a method, a system or a settled body of ideas would be to falsify its nature and lay oneself open to charges of reductive misunderstanding. Critical theory is nowadays a reputable academic business with a strong vested interest in absorbing and coming to terms with whatever new challenges the times may produce. Structuralism, it is now plain to see, was subject from the outset to a process of adaptation by British and American critics who quickly took heart from what they saw as its ‘practical’ or ‘commonsense’ uses. What started as a powerful protest against ruling critical assumptions ended up as just one more available method for saying new things about well-worn texts. By now there is probably a structuralist reading, in one guise or another, of just about every classic of English literature. A few minutes' search through the index of any learned lournal is enough to show how structuralism has taken hold in the most respectable and cherished quarters of academic study. Old polemics are quietly forgotten because the ground has meanwhile shifted to such an extent that erstwhile opponents find themselves now in a state of peaceful alliance. To trace this history in detail would provide an instructive example of the capacity of Anglo-American academic criticism to absorb and homogenize any new theory that threatens its sovereign claim.
[From "Roots: Structuralism and New Criticism", chapter 1 of Christopher Norris' Deconstruction: Theory and Practice (1982/1991)]
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Información procedente del conocimiento común inglés.Edita para encontrar en tu idioma.
Neither of these is an ‘answer’ to Derrida, in the sense of posing an obstacle to the activity of thought and the process of displacement that deconstruction has set in train. Both, on the other hand, bear witness to the unsettling power of Derrida's texts. Deconstruction has marked out a new domain of argument for the age-old quarrel between ‘literature’ and ‘philosophy’. The claims of analysis have never been pressed so far as by conceptual rhetoricians like de Man. Nor has criticism ever taken on such courage, intellectual and stylistic, in asserting its claim as a self-respecting discipline of thought. To ignore that claim is to close one's mind to something other, and more, than a short-lived swing of critical fashion.
Deconstruction: Theory and Practice has been acclaimed as by far the most readable, concise and authoritative guide to this topic. Without oversimplifying or glossing over the challenges, Norris makes deconstruction more accessible to the reader. The volume focuses on the works of Jacques Derrida which caused this seismic shift in critical thought, as well as the work of North American critics Paul de Man, Geoffrey Hartman, J. Hillis Miller and Harold Bloom. In this third, revised edition, Norris builds on his 1991 Afterword with an entirely new Postscript, reflecting upon recent critical debate. The Postscript includes an extensive list of recommended reading, complementing what was already one of the most useful bibliographies available.
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Much of the book is dedicated to providing an overview of the American reception of Derrida's work and its relation to main trends in American literary theory and criticism, specifically structuralism, New Criticism, and Marxist criticism. Norris clearly has his favourites among Derrida's American heirs: Paul de Man is repeatedly lauded for his rigour, while certain others come in for some minor censure for going too far into the sort of rhapsodic flights of imagination and whimsy that deconstruction can sometimes be taken to legitimate. But his criticism and praise avoid both fawning and the histrionics that deconstruction has sometimes inspired in its detractors.
If you are looking for a philosophical introduction to Derrida's work, this is not it, but that is clearly not its aim. (