Catherine Driscoll wrote:
>
> [large clip] it was the Yale School that *made* Derrida. I think this
> can be traced to the death of New Criticism and the investment of the Yale
> School in having something to replace that with.
That's possible. Many (not most) of the "deconstructionist" articles I from the '70s or '80s were New Criticism in a new bottle.
> Another interesting
> element for me is that, unlike New Criticism, by it's own premises (and
> because of the moment in which it emerged), deconstruction was not as
> easily confined to the top schools in an Anglophone hierarchy.
I don't understand this at all! New Criticism confined to the top schools? What is your evidence for this? It did not seem that way to me in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. I first read extensively in the New Criticism when attending a very _very_ NON-top level school: Western Michigan College of Education (now Western Michigan University). And all the younger profs there (1947-50) were aware of and friendly to the new criticism.
Carrol