The Deconstructive Angel (Meyer H. Abrams, 1912-)
Critical philosopher and cultural historian. Abrams received HA, MA and Ph.D. from Harvard and has taught since 1945 at Cornell, He is known for the editorship of The Norton Anthology of English Literature, for his contribution to literary history and history of ideas in The Mirror and the Lamp (1953) and, to the delight of the literature students, for A Glossary of Literary Terms (1971). Abrams writings display well his breadth of knowledge, as exemplified in the following essay (1971), a response to "a tendency in contemporary American criticism toward ideological monism as well as to deprecating the usefulness of knowledge of the intellectual tradition of East and West (the socalled canon) and questioning the virtues of pluralistic humanism. "
It is often said that Derrida and those who follow his lead subordinate all inquiries to a prior inquiry into language. This is true enough, but not specific enough, for it does not distinguish Derrida's work from what Richard Rorty calls "the linguistic turn" which characterizes modern Anglo-American philosophy and also a great part of Anglo-American literary criticism, including the "New Criticism," of the last half-century. What is distinctive about Derrida is first that, like other French structuralists, he shifts his inquiry from language to ecriture, the written or printed text; and second that he conceives a test in an extraordinarily limited fashion.
Derrida's initial and decisive strategy is to disestablish the priority, in traditional views of languages, of speech over writing. By priority I mean the use of oral discourse as the conceptual model from which to derive the semantic and other features of written language and of language in general. And Derrida's shift of elementary reference is to a written text which consists of what we find when we look at it — to "un texte deja ecrit, noir sur blanc. " In the dazzling play of Derrida's expositions, his ultimate recourse is to
It is often said that Derrida and those who follow his lead subordinate all inquiries to a prior inquiry into language. This is true enough, but not specific enough, for it does not distinguish Derrida's work from what Richard Rorty calls "the linguistic turn" which characterizes modern Anglo-American philosophy and also a great part of Anglo-American literary criticism, including the "New Criticism," of the last half-century. What is distinctive about Derrida is first that, like other French structuralists, he shifts his inquiry from language to ecriture, the written or printed text; and second that he conceives a test in an extraordinarily limited fashion.
Derrida's initial and decisive strategy is to disestablish the priority, in traditional views of languages, of speech over writing. By priority I mean the use of oral discourse as the conceptual model from which to derive the semantic and other features of written language and of language in general. And Derrida's shift of elementary reference is to a written text which consists of what we find when we look at it — to "un texte deja ecrit, noir sur blanc. " In the dazzling play of Derrida's expositions, his ultimate recourse is to