> >If that's all he was saying, what's the big fuss? That's not only
>utterly sensible, but utterly platitudinous.
>
>What looks like a platitude today was not so at the MLA circa 1970.
>The idea of a rigorous theory of textuality was itself something of
>an affront to those who believed they knew what kind of object they
>were studying. Among other things, the idea of the text was
>upsetting to those in literary studies who knew there was a bright
>fine line between philosophy and literature, lit and crit, etc.
Yeah, and it was fun to watch at Yale in the early 1970s, where Bloom, Hartman, and de Man (with occasional visits from Derrida) were scandalizing the old farts like Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren. Lots of disapproving clucks were heard from those nearing retirement. (Brooks, teaching Faulkner, threw in a few defenses of the Confederacy in between defenses of the concept of Evil.) Funny to see a bunch of lefties 30-35 years later sounding like the Fugitives.
Doug