[lbo-talk] How to Deconstruct Almost Anything

joanna 123hop at comcast.net
Fri Dec 22 00:05:26 PST 2006


Carrol Cox wrote:


>The opening paragraph:
>
>IT IS no new discovery that the period we used to associate with an
>organicist aesthetics, which accomplished the fusion of the signifier
>and the signified, in fact produced a Large number of texts, intentional
>in structure, that make that fusion problematical. This paper will be
>concerned specifically with a phenomenon I shall call the disappearance
>of narrative, dramatic, or conceptual actualization, a phenomenon which
>results in the absence from Romantic texts of embodied or achieved
>meaning as opposed to discarnate meaning. The problem is most obvious in
>the many Romantic texts that are fragments, where the written "text"
>does not coincide with what we may call the "work,"' the essential
>meaning which Romantic hermeneutics discovers through a reading which is
>psychological and divinatory rather than grammatical and structural
>
This was interesting. It basically makes exactly the same argument about the Romantic period as the classic Meyer H. Abrams, 1971. /The Mirror and the Lamp : Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition/; the only difference being that it expresses Abrams' insightful (and very clear) description and pellucid metaphors (mirror vs lamp) in the more difficult terminology of the deconstructionsts. This is understandable inasmuch as that terminology was the offically accepted language of criticism for the last twenty years, but you could not conclude, from this example, that this terminology advanced Abrams' observations by one inch; it just recast them in a more fashionable jargon.

Joanna



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