Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-s2hrs Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-05T13:31:03.510Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

“THE BRIDES OF DECONSTRUCTION AND CRITICISM” AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF FEMINISM IN THE NORTH AMERICAN ACADEMY

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 June 2018

GREGORY JONES-KATZ
GREGORY JONES-KATZ*
Affiliation:
School of Humanities and Social Science (HSS), the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen E-mail: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

“The Brides of Deconstruction and Criticism,” an informal group of feminist literary critics active at Yale University during the 1970s, were inspired by second-wave feminist curriculum, activities, and thought, as well as by the politics of the women's and gay liberation movements, in their effort to intervene into patterns of female effacement and marginalization. By the early 1980s, while helping direct deconstructive reading away from the self-subversiveness of French and English prose and poetry, the Brides made groundbreaking contributions to—and in several cases founded—fields of scholarly inquiry. During the late 1980s, these feminist deconstructionists, having overcome resistance from within Yale's English Department and elsewhere, used their works as social and political acts to help pave the way for the successes of cultural studies in the North American academy. Far from a supplément to what Barbara Johnson boldly called the “Male School,” the Brides of Deconstruction and Criticism arguably were the Yale school. Examining the distinct but interrelated projects of Yale's feminist deconstructive moment and how local and contingent events as well as the national climate, rather than the importation of so-called French theory, informed this moment gives us a clearer rendering of the story of deconstruction.

Type
Articles
Information
Modern Intellectual History , Volume 17 , Issue 2 , June 2020 , pp. 413 - 442
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

Thanks go to the following friends and colleagues for their help with drafts of this essay: Laura Jones-Katz, Grace Allen, Brad Baranowski, Vaneesa Cook, Aaron Dowdall, Daniel Hummel, Rivka Maizlish, Elena McGrath, Nick Strohl, Kate Turner, and Kevin Walters. Special thanks to “The Always Already Metaphysical Club.”

References

1 Johnson, Barbara, “Gender Theory and the Yale School,” Genre 17/1–2 (1984), 101–12, at 101Google Scholar.

2 Woodward, Kenneth L., “A New Look at Lit Crit,” Newsweek, 22 June 1981, 80–83, at 83, added emphasisGoogle Scholar.

3 Culler, Jonathan, On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism (Ithaca, 1982), 289Google Scholar. Felman, Shoshana, La folie et la chose littéraire (Paris, 1978)Google Scholar.

4 Johnson, “Gender Theory,” 101.

5 Hollinger, David A., “The Disciplines and the Identity Debates, 1970–1975,” in Bender, Thomas and Schorske, Carl E., eds., American Academic Culture in Transformation, with a Foreword by Graubard, Stephen R. (Princeton, 1998), 353–70, at 360, 364Google Scholar.

6 This expansion was part of the larger transformation explored by Hollinger, David A., “Introduction,” in Hollinger, ed., The Humanities and the Dynamics of Inclusion since World War II (Baltimore, 2006), 3–13, at 3–4Google Scholar.

7 Bromwich, David, “The Cost of Professionalism in the Humanities,” in Cohen, Saul B., Bromwich, David, and Stocking, George W. Jr, Learned Societies and the Evolution of the Disciplines, ACLS occasional paper no. 5 (New York, 1988), 9–16Google Scholar. For how methods in literature were scientistic during this period see Martin, Wallace, “Criticism and the Academy,” in Litz, A. Walton, Menand, Louis, and Rainey, Laurence, eds., The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism. Vol. 7: Modernism and the New Criticism (Cambridge, 2000), 269–321Google Scholar.

8 Jencks, Christopher and Riesman, David, The Academic Revolution (New York, 1968)Google Scholar.

9 Rosalind Rosenberg, “Women in the Humanities: Taking Their Place,” in Hollinger, The Humanities and the Dynamics of Inclusion since World War II, 247–9, at 249.

10 Ibid., 248.

11 Ibid., 258, 257.

12 “Women's Studies,” Newsweek, 26 Oct. 1970, 61. See Boxer, Marilyn Jacoby, When Women Ask the Questions: Creating Women's Studies in America (Baltimore, 1998), 7–24Google Scholar; Salper, Roberta, “San Diego State 1970: The Initial Year of the Nation's First Women's Studies Program,” Feminist Studies 37/3 (2011), 656–82Google Scholar.

13 Lear, Jonathan, “How Yale Selected Her First Coeds,” New York Times Magazine, 13 April 1969, 72–6, at 72Google Scholar, 76.

14 See Mary B. Arnstein, chairman, “Report to the President from the University Committee on the Education of Women, 1973–1974, July 1, 1974,” Records of President Brewster, MS-6-778, ACCN II, Box 258, Folder 11, Harvard University. Kesselman, Amy Vita, “Women's Liberation and the Left in New Haven, Connecticut, 1968–1972,” Radical History Review 81 (2001), 15–33, at 17Google Scholar.

15 Dedman, Julien, The Rape of Yale: How a Great University Went Wrong (Southport, CT, 1969), 11Google Scholar.

16 “A Report to Yale Corporation by the Yale Undergraduate Women's Caucus,” Catherine A. MacKinnon Papers, Box 16 Folder 7, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University, 1.

17 Correspondence from Barbara Deinhardt, administrative assistant to Elga Wasserman, re: “Women's Studies,” 14 July 1972, Women's and Gender Studies Files (WGSF), Yale University. Arnstein, “Report.” “A Report to the Yale Corporation from the Yale Undergraduate Women's Caucus (1977),” Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University, 5.

18 See “A Report to the President from the Committee on the Status of Professional Women at Yale,” May 1971, at http://wff.yale.edu/sites/default/files/files/1971_A_Report_to_the_PresidentProfWomen.pdf, 3, 15, accessed 7 July 2016.

19 Nan Robertson, “Betty Friedan Ushers in a ‘Second Stage’,” New York Times, 19 Oct. 1981, at www.nytimes.com/books/99/05/09/specials/friedan-stage.html, accessed 8 July 2016. Friedan's course served as a testing ground for The Second Stage (New York, 1981).

20 Hollinger, “The Disciplines and the Identity Debates,” 362–3. Rosenberg, “Women in the Humanities,” 257.

21 “Feminist Groups in New Haven,” 1, 2, 4. Katherine Kennedy, “The Emerging Women Series of the New Haven Socialist/Feminist Women's Group,” Catherine A. MacKinnon Papers 1946–2009, Box 16, Folder 6, 1.

22 Catherine Mackinnon, memo to the Committee on the Education of Women, re: “Notes toward an Argument for Women's Studies,” 1 Nov. 1978, WGSF, Box 16, Folder 7, 1.

23 Mackinnon, Catherine, Sexual Harassment of Working Women: A Case of Sex Discrimination (New Haven, 1979), 1Google Scholar.

24 Rowe, Mary, “Saturn's Rings: A Study of the Minutiae of Sexism Which Maintain Discrimination and Inhibit Affirmative Action Results in Corporations and Non-profit Institutions,” Graduate and Professional Education of Women, American Association of University Women (Washington, DC), May 1974, 1–9Google Scholar. See “A Report to the Yale Corporation from the Yale Undergraduate Women's Caucus (1977),” 4.

25 The 1978 summer term had a total enrollment of 119 students. See “Yale College Summer Term 28 May to 15 August: Plan Ahead,” Yale Daily News, 16 Nov. 1977, 19. Mary Ressler, “Women's Caucus Sharpens Focus,” Yale Daily News, 9 Nov. 1977. “A Report to the Yale Corporation from the Yale Undergraduate Women's Caucus (1977),” 13, 14.

26 Ellman, Mary, Thinking about Women (New York, 1968)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Millet, Kate, Sexual Politics (New York, 1970)Google Scholar; Spacks, Patricia Meyer, The Female Imagination: A Literary and Psychological Investigation of Women's Writing (New York, 1975)Google Scholar; Moer, Ellen, Literary Women: The Great Writers (New York, 1976)Google Scholar; Showalter, Elaine, “Literary Criticisms,” Signs 1/1 (1975), 435–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Showalter, A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing (Princeton, 1977).

27 Bernikow, Louise, ed., The World Split Open: Four Centuries of Women Poets in England and America, 1552–1950 (New York, 1974)Google Scholar.

28 Yale Course Critique 1976 (New Haven, 1976), 24. Yale Course Critique 1977 (New Haven, 1977), 15.

29 Kernan, Alvin, In Plato's Cave (New Haven, 2000), 191Google Scholar. “A Report to the Yale Corporation from the Yale Undergraduate Women's Caucus (1977),” 4. Kernan, Alvin B., Brooks, Peter, and Holquist, J. Michael, eds., Man and His Fictions: An Introduction to Fiction-Making, Its Forms and Uses (New York, 1973)Google Scholar.

30 Johnson, Barbara, “Review: The Critical Difference,” Diacritics, 8/2 (1978), 2–9, at 4CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

31 de Man, Paul, “Semiology and Rhetoric,” in de Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust (New Haven, 1979), 3–19, at 17Google Scholar.

32 Johnson, Barbara, Défigurations du langage poétique: La seconde révolution baudelairienne (Paris, 1979), 86Google Scholar, original emphasis. Johnson specifically engaged Suzanne Bernard's reading of Baudelaire. See Bernard, Suzanne, Le poème en prose de Baudelaire jusqu’à nos jours (Paris, 1959)Google Scholar.

33 Johnson, Défigurations, 37.

34 Culler, On Deconstruction, 228 f.1.

35 Derrida, Jacques, “Les fins de l'homme,” in Derrida, Marges de la philosophie (Paris, 1972), 129–64Google Scholar, at 139, original emphasis. Johnson, Barbara, “The Last Man” (trans. Robbins, Bruce from “Le dernier homme”), in Fisch, Audrey A., Mellor, Anne K., Schor, Esther H., eds., The Other Mary Shelley: Beyond Frankenstein (Oxford, 1993), 258–66, at 259, 265.Google Scholar

36 See Linkin, Harriet Kramer, “The Current Canon in British Romantics Studies,” College English 53/5 (1991), 548–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Ellen Moer's discussion of Frankenstein in the New York Review of Books and her Literary Women, which included her interpretation of the novel as an example of the “female Gothic” and helped to elevate Mary Shelley's status. Moers, Ellen, “Female Gothic,” in Moers, Literary Women: The Great Writers (London, 1977), 90–98Google Scholar. See also Rubenstein, Marc A., “‘My Accursed Origin’: The Search for the Mother in Frankenstein,” Studies in Romanticism 15/2 (1976), 165–94CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gilbert, Sandra, “Horror's Twin: Mary Shelley's Monstrous Eve,” Feminist Studies 4/2 (1978), 48–73CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

37 “Literature 120a: Narrative Forms,” Syllabus, Fall 1979, Box 31, Folder 8, Literature 120a Narrative Forms 1979–1984, J. Hillis Miller Papers, Critical Theory Archive, UC Irvine Libraries Special Collections, 1. “Literature 120a: Narrative Forms,” Syllabus, Fall 1980, Box 31, Folder 6, Literature 120a Narrative Forms 1979–1984, J. Hillis Miller Papers, Critical Theory Archive, UC Irvine Libraries Special Collections, 1.

38 Literature 120,” Paper Topics, Fall 1979, Box 31, Folder 6, Literature 120a Narrative Forms 1979–1984, J. Hillis Miller Papers, Critical Theory Archive, UC Irvine Libraries Special Collections, 1. “Literature 120,” Paper Topics, Fall 1980, Box 31, Folder 9, J. Hillis Miller Papers, Critical Theory Archive, UC Irvine Libraries Special Collections, 1.

39 Homans, Margaret, “Studies in the Feminine Poetic Imagination: Dorothy Wordsworth, Emily Brontë, and Emily Dickinson” (unpublished Ph.D. thesis., Yale University, 1978), 1Google Scholar.

40 Homans, Margaret, Bearing the Word: Language and Female Experience in Nineteenth-Century Women's Writings (Chicago, 1986), xiiGoogle Scholar, 29, 30.

41 Bloom, Harold, “Frankenstein, or the New Prometheus,’” Partisan Review 32/4 (1965), 611–18, at 613Google Scholar, 614; “Afterword,” in Shelley, Mary W., Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus (New York, 1965), 212–23Google Scholar.

42 Harold Bloom to J. Hillis Miller, letter, 27 Aug. 1974, Box 31, Folder 26, J. Hillis Miller Papers, Critical Theory Archive, UC Irvine Libraries Special Collections, 4.

43 Felperin, Howard, In Another Life: The Decline and Fall of the Humanities through the Eyes of an Ivy-League Jew (Bloomington, 2014), 82Google Scholar.

44 Arni, Caroline and Suter, Mischa, “A Science of the Specific: An Interview with Mary Poovey,” Historische Anthropologie Jahrgang 3 (2016), 432–44, at 432CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 443.

45 Poovey, Mary, “My Hideous Progeny: Mary Shelley and the Feminization of Romanticism,” PLMA 95/3 (1980), 332–47, at 332Google Scholar, 338.

46 Rigolot, François, review of Freccero, Carla, Father Figures: Geneaology and Narrative Structure in Rabelais, Modern Philology 91/4 (1994), 482Google Scholar.

47 Ferguson, Margaret W., Trials of Desire: Renaissance Defenses of Poetry (New Haven, 1983), 20CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ferguson, “The Exile's Defense: DuBellay's La Deffense et illustration de la langue françoyse,” PLMA 32/2 (1978), 275.

48 Greene, Thomas M., The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry (New Haven, 1982), 193Google Scholar, 195–6.

49 Miller, J. Hillis, “Tales Out of (the Yale) School,” in Grishakova, Marina and Salupere, Silvi, eds., Theoretical Schools and Circles in the Twentieth-Century Humanities: Literary Theory, History, Philosophy (Routledge, 2015), 115–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 116.

50 Lacan, Jacques, “God and the Jouissance of Women,” in Mitchell, Juliet and Rose, Jacqueline, eds., Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the École Freudienne (New York, 1983), 144Google Scholar.

51 Quoted in Rudnytsky, Peter L., Rescuing Psychoanalysis from Freud and Other Essays in Re-vision (London, 2011), 153Google Scholar.

52 Chesler, Phyllis, Women and Madness (New York, 1972)Google Scholar; Irigaray, Luce, Speculum de l'autre femme (Paris, 1974)Google Scholar. Felman, Shoshana, “Women and Madness: The Critical Phallacy,” Diacritics 5/4 (1975), 2–10, at 10CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

53 Felman, “Women and Madness,” 10, original emphasis.

54 Ibid.

55 Felman, Shoshana, “To Open the Question,” Yale French Studies 55/56 (1977), 5–10, at 7, original emphasisGoogle Scholar.

56 Ibid., original emphasis.

57 Felman, Shoshana, “Turning the Screw of Interpretation,” Yale French Studies 55/56 (1977), 94–207, at 196, original emphasisGoogle Scholar.

58 Johnson, Barbara, “The Frame of Reference: Poe, Lacan, Derrida,” Yale French Studies 55/56 (1977), 457–505, at 465Google Scholar.

59 Ibid., 464.

60 Ibid., 465.

61 Ibid., 464, original emphasis, 465, 464.

62 Women's Studies Task Force, “Feminism and Humanism: An Introduction to Women's Studies,” Original Proposal for Syllabus, 1976–1977, WGSF.

63 Judith Berman Brandenburg quoted in “Yale to Offer BA in Women's Studies: Becomes 2nd Ivy League School to Offer a Major—Will Begin in 1982,” New York Times, 22 Nov. 1981. Dennis Williams, Marsha Zabarsky, and Dianne H. McDonald, “Out of the Academic Ghetto,” Newsweek, 31 Oct. 1983, 86.

64 Bean, Kellie, Post-backlash Feminism: Women and the Media since Reagan–Bush (Jefferson, 2007), 18Google Scholar.

65 Mark Kerr and Kristen O'Rourke, “Sedgwick Sense and Sensibility: An Interview with Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick,” http://nideffer.net/proj/Tvc/interviews/20.Tvc.v9.intrvws.Sedg.html, accessed 10 Oct. 2017.

66 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “The Coherence of Gothic Conventions” (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Yale University, 1975); Sedgwick, The Coherence of Gothic Conventions (New York, 1980), 149, 146.

67 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, “The Character in the Veil: Imagery of the Surface in the Gothic Novel,” PMLA 96/2 (1981), 255–70, at 259CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 256.

68 H. A. Sedgwick, at http://evekosofskysedgwick.net/biography/biography.html, accessed 10 Oct. 2017.

69 Gaudin, Colette, Green, Mary Jean, Higgins, Lynn Anthony, Hirsch, Marianne, Kogan, Vivian, Reeder, Claudia, and Vickers, Nancy, “Introduction,” Yale French Studies 62 (1981), 2–18, at 2Google Scholar.

70 Ibid., 12, 5.

71 The original context of this sentence appeared in Johnson, Barbara, The Critical Difference: Essays in the Contemporary Rhetoric of Reading (Baltimore, 1980), 284Google Scholar.

72 Gallop, Jane, Around 1981: Academic Feminist Literary Theory (New York, 1992), 15Google Scholar.

73 Johnson, Barbara, “My Monster/My Self,” Diacritics 12/2 (1982), 2–10CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Homans, Margaret, “Eliot, Wordsworth, and the Scenes of the Sisters’ Instruction,” Critical Inquiry 8/2 (1981), 223–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

74 See Felman, Shoshana, “Education and Crisis, or the Vicissitudes of Teaching,” American Imago 48/1 (1991), 473–95Google Scholar. Felman, Shoshana and Laub, Dori, Testimony: Crisis of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (London, 1992)Google Scholar.

75 Johnson, Barbara, “Metaphor, Metonymy and Voice in Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God,” in Johnson, A World of Difference (Baltimore, 1987), 155–71, at 163. See also Johnson's colleague at Harvard, Henry Louis Gates Jr., “Zora Neale Hurston and the Speakerly Text,” in Gates, The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism (New York, 1988), 184–232.Google Scholar

76 Johnson, “Gender Theory and the Yale School,” 102.

77 “WGSS at Yale: Reflections, Celebrations, and Visions,” at https://wgss.yale.edu/about, accessed 9 Nov. 2017.

78 Johnson, “Gender Theory and the Yale School,” 101.

79 Ibid., 102.

80 Ibid.