Theory at Yale: The Strange Case of Deconstruction in America by Marc Redfield (review)

Correction:
The editors of MLN 131.5 regret misprinting the title of Marc Redfield's book in the review by Benjamin Gillespie. The correct title is Theory at Yale: The Strange Case of Deconstruction in America (Fordham UP 2015). The online version has been corrected.

Marc Redfield’s Theory at Yale: The Strange Case of Deconstruction in America performs the unenviable task of elucidating the rise of critical theory in the American academy. Though ostensibly circumscribed by Yale’s borders, his study has far-reaching consequences for the cultural reception and subsequent canonization of ‘theory,’ ‘deconstruction,’ and the associated Yale critics, namely Paul de Man, Geoffrey Hartman, Harold Bloom, and J. Hillis Miller. Redfield builds on earlier work, especially The Politics of Aesthetics (Stanford University Press, 2003), which productively plunges into Romanticism, mediation, the power of figurative language, and, of course, Paul de Man. Though the explications and explorations of the other figures are brilliant, at its foundation, The Yale School feels at once a recuperation, defanging, and oblique apology of de Man, who has borne the brunt of numerous denunciations as the representative of theory and academic aloofness.

The book’s greatest achievement is its calm but persistent disentangling of the knots of ‘theory’ as it actually was and how it has been remembered. Redfield is devoted to revealing the heterogeneity of ‘theory’ and deconstruction both among and within the work of his fantastic four as well as in that of their hovering mascot, Derrida. The latter makes several appearances (like the visiting professor at Yale he was), and he haunts the text like a poltergeist as his words emerge for useful summaries, pivots, or ricochets. Through diligent close reading and extended contemplations of deconstruction and the evolution of the American university, Redfield illuminates the frictions and misrepresentations that catalyzed its moderate press attention and the consequent obfuscation of humanities scholarship in mass media.

Early on, Redfield is quick to decouple ‘theory’ and deconstruction, but he resists the temptation to regiment or simplify them, rather he complicates their relationship within the Yale School as well as their respective receptions and institutionalizations. Shoshana Felman and Barbara Johnson make a few appearances, but Redfield is more interested in tracking the relative notoriety of the four men from Yale rather than correcting neglect—his defense of this inattention would feel more hollow if the book were not so rooted in close readings of media representations, but it certainly indicates a need for further scholarship. The recent biography by Evelyn Barish, The Double Life of Paul de Man, was an obvious catalyst for this project, and Redfield is pointedly dismissive of her work as she professes to not understand the very ‘theory’ she derides. His criticism is well taken and even intuitive; he makes a poignant rejoinder to the personification of ‘theory’ as de Man and thus the entire enterprise being put to trial for his character. Redfield is especially effective when exposing that this suspicion of ‘theory’ reflects a larger impetus to find any grounds for rejecting difficult texts, or anything that resists immediate legibility. Beyond the clear political stakes of such reactions, Redfield makes evident that such misreadings are, in fact, strong indicators of the “slipperiness of language” that helped to agitate each character of the Yale School.

In the introduction and first chapter, Redfield traces the trajectories of each individual member of the Yale School and the literary landscape at Yale before their arrival. Miller and de Man’s scholastic identities were the most tightly coiled within Yale, while other figures who passed through (e.g., Jameson) were able to escape the label of “Yale School.” As a European with an American Ph.D. de Man, Redfield argues, was uniquely vulnerable to becoming the embodiment of theory. When he describes aesthetics as an acculturated phenomenon, Redfield also provides some sense of what led him to this work, namely that ‘theory’ and deconstruction, beyond their stakes in his Romanticist studies...