How can an interpretive theory gain legitimacy in two cultural markets as different as France and the United States? This study examines the intellectual, cultural, institutional, and social conditions of legitimation of Jacques Derrida's work in the two countries and develops hypotheses about the process of legitimation of interpretive theories. The legitimation of Derrida's work resulted from a fit between it and highly structured cultural and institutional systems. In France, Derrida capitalized on the structure of the intellectual market by targeting his work to a large cultural public rather than to a shrinking group of academic philosophers. His work appealed to the intellectual public as a status symbol and as a novel and sophisticated way to deal with late 1960s politics. In the United States, Derrida and a group of prestigious literary critics reframed his theory and disseminated it in university departments of literature. His work was imported concurrently with the work of other French scholars with whom he shared a market. Derrida's support is more concentrated and stronger in one discipline than the support for other French intellectuals. In America, professional institutions and journals played a central role in the diffusion of his work, while cultural media were more central in France.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/SSRN_ID2131424_code1585413.pdf?abstractid=2131424&mirid=1

How to Become a Dominant French Philosopher: The Case of Jacques Derrida

How can an interpretive theory gain legitimacy in two cultural markets as different as France and the United States? This study examines the intellectual, cultural, institutional, and social conditions of legitimation of Jacques Derrida's work in the two countries and develops hypotheses about the process of legitimation of interpretive theories. The legitimation of Derrida's work resulted from a fit between it and highly structured cultural and institutional systems. In France, Derrida capitalized on the structure of the intellectual market by targeting his work to a large cultural public rather than to a shrinking group of academic philosophers. His work appealed to the intellectual public as a status symbol and as a novel and sophisticated way to deal with late 1960s politics. In the United States, Derrida and a group of prestigious literary critics reframed his theory and disseminated it in university departments of literature. His work was imported concurrently with the work of other French scholars ...

/pdf/how-to-become-a-dominant-french-philosopher-the-case-of-1ngt4kadha.pdf

How to Become a Dominant French Philosopher: The Case of Jacques Derrida'

There are two forms of deconstruction. Radical DECONSTRUCTION is rare. It is a sign of deep crisis and extraordinary skepticism among intellectual workers facing high uncertainty. Moderate deconstruction, however, occurs wherever conflicts over knowledge are built into the competitive and adversarial structure of social fields. We illustrate the social dynamics of moderate deconstruction for two specific cases: making facts in science and building cases in law. There are strategies of deconstruction common to both science and law which generalize untrustworthiness and thus economize on deconstruction costs. These strategies are rhetoric, ideology, procedure (or method), and reputation. Under certain conditions, moderate deconstruction turns into radical DECONSTRUCTION. This is most likely to happen in revolutionary science and in loosely coupled textual fields that have minimal hardware and social solidarity.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/2095926.pdf

What is Deconstruction, and Where and When Does it Take Place? Making Facts in Science, Building Cases in Law

words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names or rivers, the numbers of regiments and dates. Dos Passos declared that “no excuse of pragmatic expediency justified the war”; in The Three Soldiers, Coningsby Dawson observes, army life fosters only “contented moral rottenness.” Charles Yale Harrison’s Generals Die in Bed (1930), whose central theme is “the brutalizing effect of war” on soldiers, is described by Pierre Berton as “the most cynical novel of the era.” The poignancy of such war novels is greatly diminished if they are understood to represent war as a necessary (as opposed to a sadly inevitable) evil. Barker and Remarque Rawlinson distinguishes All Quiet on the Western Front from the Regeneration trilogy, arguing that for Remarque, “the theatre of atrocity is played out only before those who are party to the killing; families know nothing of what has become of their sons.” As Rawlinson notes, Barker mostly presents the front’s atrocities as they are recounted in therapy, rather than as they occur at the front. Ladan Amir 191 Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2012), 161. Billy Prior writes an entry in his journal that resonates with Hemingway’s: “Loos, she said. I remember standing by the bar and thinking that words didn’t mean anything any more. Patriotism honour courage vomit vomit vomit. Only the names meant anything. Mons, Loos, the Somme, Arras, Verdun, Ypres” (579). Bergonzi accuses Barker of “half-remembering or simply lifting [this] well known passage from Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms”: Bergonzi, War Poets and Other Subjects, 12. I believe that Barker consciously evokes Hemingway’s phrase here in order to convey the parity between Prior’s disillusionment in the Regeneration trilogy, and Henry’s disillusionment in A Farewell to Arms. 192 Ian Colley, Dos Passos and the Fiction of Despair (London: Macmillan, 1978), 2. A. Hamilton Gibbs thought The Three Soldiers to be “magnificent ... a combination of Barbusse and Sassoon and Frankau, an extraordinary mixture of poetry and terrible prose pictures”: cited by Virginia Spencer Carr in Dos Passos: A Life (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2004), 187. 193 Coningsby Dawson, “Insulting the Army,” New York Times Book Review 2 October 1921, 1, no. 16–17, cited in Dos Passos: The Critical Heritage, ed. Barry Maine (London and New York: Routledge, 1988), 35. 194 Dagmar Novak, Dubious Glory: The Two World Wars and the Canadian Novel (New York: Peter Lang, 2000), 60. Cited by Clausson, “Charles Yale Harrison’s Little-Known Minor Masterpiece: Generals Die in Bed, Modernism and the Canon of World War I Fiction,” War, Literature and the Arts, 23, no. 1 (2011): np. 195 Pierre Berton, Marching as to War: Canada’s Turbulent Years 1899–1953 (Toronto: Anchor Canada, 2002), 302; cited by Nils Clausson, “Charles Yale Harrison,” np. 196 Rawlinson. Pat Barker, 64. 197 I disagree with Rawlinson’s statement that “Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder represents a literal return of the repressed”: Rawlinson, Pat Barker, 65, my emphasis. The stress that arises from trauma

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Cruelties incomprehensible: the alienated gaze at war in Pat Barker's Regeneration trilogy

Depuis les romans oulipiens d’Italo Calvino – Si par une nuit d’hiver un voyageur et Le Château des destins croises – jusqu’aux hypertextes de fiction se joue une redefinition de la forme et des enjeux de l’enchâssement narratif. Ce travail vise, a partir d’un corpus contemporain, a explorer les mutations que connait cet agencement de recits percu comme traditionnel et theorise en France dans les annees 1960 par Gerard Genette et Tzvetan Todorov. Nous proposons, avec la notion de multiplication des recits, un assouplissement de ses contours afin d’aborder un corpus d’oeuvres romanesques cherchant a tisser ensemble plusieurs recits tout en brouillant les reperes hierarchiques impliques par les notions d’enchâssement ou d’insertion. Croisant approche narratologique et prise en compte de la reception, ce travail se donne pour objectif d’interroger ce qu’est la multiplication des recits en ne perdant jamais de vue ses effets, en particulier sur la mise en intrigue (P. Ricoeur) : comment comprendre et analyser la reception passionnee (R. Baroni) du lecteur face a des oeuvres parfois monstrueuses, entremelant les strates narratives et courant le risque du desordre, de la perte et de l’illisible ? Nous proposons de suivre a la trace le lecteur intrigue, protagoniste de cette etude et arpenteur ou geometre des espaces fictionnels et textuels ouverts par la multiplication des recits, a travers sa progression dans des romans – imprimes ou numeriques – qui placent au coeur de leurs enjeux la question du dispositif narratif

Multiplication des récits et stéréométrie littéraire : d’Italo Calvino aux épifictions contemporaines

Toward the end of After Theory, Docherty provides "the basic outlines of a postmodernist theory, the kind of theory which the text in fact has practiced throughout." All thought since the Enlightenment, he tells us, has been based on logic, which in its operations is indistinguishable from ideology. Neither one requires or permits "real critical thinking"; "it is the system ... which does the thinking and which provides the answers." This view implies that theories cannot be challenged by reference to facts; that what we may see as philosophical or ideological differences are infallibly generated from assumptions by "rigorously policed or disciplined" conventions; and that rationality, "a system of oppression," is "terroristic" (pp. 207-09). The alternative is a postmodern alterity and heterogeneity. "Since this thinking orjudging has no criteria ... it becomes difficult to understand" (p. 11). Such views are commonplace in the thirty-odd books now produced annually with the word "postmodern" in the title. Lacking a jurisdiction competent to hear their claims, postmodernists find themselves subjected to peremptory judgment by rationalists-a perfect example of the differend, as conceived by Lyotard: "A case of differend between two parties takes place when the 'regulation' of the conflict that opposes them is done in the idiom of one of the parties while the wrong suffered by the other is not signified in that idiom" (The Differend, p. 9). By this high standard of justice, it is unfair to criticize postmodernism in a rational idiom. But by the same token, postmodernists have no right, Lyotard would say, to deprive rationalists of any means to argue their own case. This differend cannot be adjudicated, but it can be complicated by showing that it is a tangle of differences, not a clearcut opposition. Objections to theory, for example, take varied forms. Rationalists hold that some theories are demonstrably wrong. Many have argued that theories of some things are bound to be wrong. That was what Kant held concerning the aesthetic; in Gadamer, the sphere of the untheorizable is extended. Most species of the genre of postmodernism hold that all theories are bound to be wrong. But here discriminations prove useful. The antitheorisms of Wittgenstein, Rorty, Dreyfus, Derrida, and Lyotard are distinct. In the case of Docherty, the rejection of theory appears to arise from the following syllogism: (1) Scientific theories are paradigmatic of rational thought. (2) Marxism, a rigorously scientific theory, has proven false. (3) Therefore, all theories are false (p.

From poetics to postmodernism

The Yale Critics: Deconstruction in America

Provided with two decades of hindsight, we are now in a position to assess the practical consequences of the epoch of theory, which have been very different in France and the United States. Antoine Compagnon, in the book here reviewed, says that the French new criticism "was solidly incorporated into the curriculum of France's national education, especially in secondary teaching. This may well have been precisely what made it so rigid. It is impossible today to pass an entrance exam without mastering the subtle distinctions and jargon of narratology" (3). In the United States, which lacks France's coordination of curriculum, testing, and college admission, theory had no comparable effect. Freed from the onus of reducing theory to a national pedagogy and teaching it to students, professors of English were able to pursue their own theoretical interests, producing a postmodernist discourse that is the subject of Walter Benn Michaels's book. Compagnon's book can be seen as the final episode of a history recounted in his earlier writings. La Troisieme Ripublique des lettres, de Flaubert a' Proust (1983) traced the rise of literary history and explication de texte under the aegis of Gustave Lanson. In Literature, Theory, and Common Sense, he notes that the critical and theoretical issues important in other countries gained no foothold in France during the first half of the twentieth century. With the advent of the nouvelle critique and the new philosophers in the 1960s, the French leapfrogged over developments elsewhere, initiating a theoretical phase that appeared to be ending in the 1980s. Pressed by others to write about developments after World War II, Compagnon did so indirectly in The Five Paradoxes of Modernity (1990; English trans., 1994). His teaching at Columbia University had by then exposed him to the alien vocabulary of this country's literary study. In the preface to the English translation, he says that his cisatlantic experience left him with "a persistent sense of self-consciousness and Unheimlichkeit" (vii). Unfortunate as it may

Wallace Martin

Papers

From poetics to postmodernism

The Yale Critics: Deconstruction in America

The Yale Critics: Deconstruction in America

In Theory's Wake