Rodolphe Gasché

Unscrambling Positions: On Gerald Graff's Critique of Deconstruction

Alarmed by the present state of literary studies, many critics, themselves entangled in empirical criticism and obsessed with the need to keep literature safe from outside invasion, have begun to speak in an apocalyptic manner of a conspiracy against all literary values. These critics, who identify the oncoming threat against criticism with the anatomizing science of linguistics or with a conversion of literary studies into a province of philosophy, have themselves become blind to criticisms own philosophical history. This loss of awareness of criticisms ties with philosophy makes it seem that these critics inhabit the ruins-not unlike the herds of