Deconstruction and Ideology in Current Literary Theory

Review Article Deconstruction and Ideology in Current Literary Theory JULIAN PATRICK Michael Riffaterre. Text Production. Translated by Therese Lyons New York: Columbia University Press 1983. $25.00 Jonathan Culler. On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1982. 307. $19·95, $8.95 paper Terry Eagleton. Literary Theory: An Introduction Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1983. viii, 244. $29.50, $11.00 paper Vincent B. Leitch. Deconstructive Criticism: An Advanced Introduction New York: Columbia University Press 1983. xii, 290. $27.50, $11.00 paper Jonathan Arac, Wlad Godzich, Wallace Martin, editors. The Yale Critics: Deconstruction in America Theory and History of Literature, volume 6. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1983. xxxvii, 222. $29.50, $12.95 paper Christopher Butler. Interpretation, Deconstruction, and Ideology: An Introduction to Some Current Issues in Literary Theory Oxford: Oxford University Press 1984. 159· $24.95, $10.95 paper Most of the books discussed here mention the widespread post-structuralist opinion that neither 'literature' nor 'theory' refers unambiguously to a stable concept. That seems as good a place as any to begin a review of six books that, collectively, recall the place from which we have come, and seek to define the speculative energies driving us on, and beyond. But who are we? Since it is impossible to answer such a question without reference to deep divisions within the supposed pluralistic consensus, here is a sketch of three quite distinct, we· (that is, ,them' versus 'us') positions within the current paradigm shift in literary theory. From the right wing of this highly politicized situation, 'literary theory' now comprises an orthodoxy, or establishment position, displacing all earlier humanisms, and especiallythatassociatedwith theT.S. Eliot-centred generation, UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 56, NUMBER 2, WINTER 1986/7 DECONSTRUCTION AND IDEOLOGY 339 who have now retreated to Geoffrey Hill or A.R. Ammons, both 'poet-theorists' in an older sense. From this perspective, the only appropriate attitude to literary theory is to resist it in the name of traditional values. By contrast, the liberal centre ofthe spectrum feels thatliterary theory has now made its case forinc1usion within graduate and undergraduate programs as a progressive option within literary studies: it is to be taken seriously for its rich fund of speculative knowledge. The radical left holds that literary theory has most to fear from exactly this sort of assimilation, that its project was and is the transfonnation oftraditionalist literary criticism, not a cozy adjacency with things as they are. All three positions are affected by the endlessly circulating post-everything atmosphere in current cultural studies: post-structuralist, post-modernist, post-feminist, post-theory, and post- Big Bang, with its post-employment (or monetarist) connection to the relativizing pragmatisms around. If the late seventies were a time of extreme uncertainty and depression in geo-politics, and especially for the publishing industry, the currentwild commercial success of almost any book with' theory' in the title certainly indicates that whether or not you call it 'late' capitalism, its final hectic flush looks also like a kind of health. It is certainly possible to argue, as do several writers in The Yale Critics, that post-structuralist literary theory and criticism simply develop, even repeat, positions implicit in the immanent, text-based values of structuralism and New Criticism, that there is very little new under this sun except the jargon, the wearying difficulty olthe prose, and the ~lite values it represents. Yetmostwriters reviewed would argue that to understand post-structuralist literary theory at all involves taking the force of the genuine epistemological break, or paradigm shift, that has occurred since approximately the heyday of French structuralism in the mid-sixties. It can be seen here most acutely in the enonnous distance Terry Eagleton has put between his current position and the modified Althusserianism of Criticism and Ideology (1976), and in the exactly analogous distance separating Jonathan Culler's Chomskyan proposals of Structuralist Poetics (1975) from his current deconstruction (though not abandonment) ofconventionalism. A sense of the kind of paradigm shift 'we' are talking about can perhaps best be caught by attending to the contemporary use of the phrase 'literary theory' itself. It is rarely used now in either oftwo ways we would...