Y ale S chool

Abstract

The “Yale School” is the term commonly used to describe the work of five outstanding scholars – Harold Bloom, Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, Geoffrey Hartman, and J. Hillis Miller – located in the departments of French and Comparative Literature, and of English, at Yale University between 1972 and 1986. It is often referred to as the Yale School of deconstruction or even as “American deconstruction” in general. While de Man used the term “deconstruction” and both Derrida and Miller remained aligned with this term throughout their writing, the connection between Bloom and Hartman and deconstruction is less obvious. Three broad factors, however, link these critics and thinkers. First, this grouping of scholars represented a profoundly influential opening in literary theory and criticism in North America at this time, through which French‐influenced poststructuralist theoretical inquiry came to be accepted, albeit contentiously, in the US humanities, although their reading strategies circled much more within the ambit of Derrida than any other French thinker. Second, and more subtly, what the Yale scholars have most in common is a shared interest in European Romanticism, from Derrida's frequent sorties into eighteenth‐century philosophy, de Man's work on Rousseau, to Hartman's many commentaries on English Romantic poetry. As commentators on eighteenth‐century and early nineteenth‐century thought, the Yale School might be thought of as representing the reopening of Enlightenment thought through deconstructive reading. Finally, their influence is perhaps most keenly felt in the impressive array of graduate students who passed through the Yale comparative literature doctoral program at the time and who subsequently came to dominate literary and cultural theory in the United States for a generation. Accordingly, the Yale School might be more meaningfully thought of as identifying this pedagogical legacy with the expanded graduate diaspora being more worthy of the title “Yale School” than the five original scholars. The only significant volume produced by the Yale quintet together is the collection of essays Deconstruction and Criticism (Bloom et al. 1979), in which each critic contributes an essay on Shelley's “The triumph of life.”