Structuralism and Grammatology

Abstract

In organizing this conference the editors of boundary 2 have asked us to consider the situation of contemporary American criticism, in which, as they say, various methods and rhetorics have been competing to replace the New Criticism. As one of the opening speakers, my job is to utter some debatable propositions so that they can be debated: I'm going to make tendentious remarks about the relationship between some of these competing modes of discourse. I chose my title because I had intended to concentrate on two competing discourses, which can be called roughly the structuralist and deconstructionist, and to look at a point of intersection, a moment of competition: Derrida's reading of Saussure in De la grammatologie. Though I shall do this briefly in order to discuss the relationship between structuralism and deconstruction, I respond to my place on the program by casting my net a bit wider and addressing the larger topic which the organizers call The Question of Formalism: From Aesthetic Distance to Difference. In the competition among modes of discourse to replace the New Criticism, what has happened to formalism? I think I can report that it is alive and well, doing very nicely.