Paul de Man was one of the most important "stars" in the firmament of literary Theory. He was born in Belgium in 1919 and immigrated to New York City in 1948. He became a first generation deconstuctionist in the late 1960s and went to Yale in 1970 where he became one of the so-called "Yale Mafia" of deconstructive critics (Jacques Derrida, J. Hillis Miller, and Geoffrey Hartman were the other three). He died in 1983. In the late 80s, however, a cache of his wartime journalism was discovered, and some of the articles were anti-Semitic. The result was a scandal in the academy. Did this history undermine the validity of his later academic work?
The tweet below, brought to my attention by Amardeep Singh, refers to John Guillory, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (2013), which I have not read. Note the second sentence: "That scandal reveals...the fact that the charismatic persona of the master theorist is the vehicle for the dissemination of theory; otherwise the status of deconstructive theory could not rise or fall with the reputation of its master." How many literary critics were "stars" in that sense? Is literary criticism, as a discipline, particularly vulnerable to this charisma, to use Guillory's term?
Hey-we-should-all-be-reading-Cultural-Capital-again-take-5343404359 pic.twitter.com/Ybd2mvWXoI— Merve Emre (@mervatim) August 24, 2018
ADDENDUM (2.21.24): Harold Bloom certainly was a charismatic critical star. Would any variety of criticism fall is some intellectual scandal became attached to him comparable to what happened with de Man? I think not. What does that imply about his status within the academy?
No comments:
Post a Comment