what's new about deconstruction?

[Dave Monroe]

A few things here, briefly.  First off, do note that
"American Literary Deconstruction" or whatever isn't
quite the same thing as Derridean "deconstructive"
philosophy.  I think your "target" (?) here is the
former, but ....  Second, "Fashionability" is beside
the point--so what if anything involved here is
"fashionable" or not?  "Deconstruction," whatever that
means, has meant, will mean, has in the past been
lambasted as all too fashionable, now the complaint is
that it's out of fashion?  And ...?  Third, someone
with a decades-long career isn't allowed to change
his/her mind, maybe even learn (or unlearn, not always
a bad thing ...) something along the way?  But I'm not
a particular fan of Stanley Fish myself who, Fourth,
and lastly, isn't a "deconstructionist," but rather a
literary and legal scholar of that
antifoundationalist, neopragmatist line a la Richard
Rorty (himself a notably weak reader of Derrida). 
Again, a nice institutional history alongside as a
reply to critics here ...

Raparort, Herman.  The Theory Mess: Deconstruction
   in Eclipse.  New York: Columbia UP, 2000.

Fish, by the way, seems to be at pains to tick off the
"deconstructive menace" himself these days, although
he did take the interesting step of abandoning his
comfy roost at Duke (Kudzu League, vs. Ivy?) for the U
of Illinois at Chicago, right off the infamous Cabrini
Green ...

--- Doug Millison <DMillison at ftmg.net> wrote:
> 
> "In the most recent sections of the book Fish seems
> to have realised that to
> argue for a single, authorial interpretation is now
> deeply unfashionable,
> and his account undergoes drastic revision. Milton,
> he now tells us, was
> actually a "postmodern", who believed all truth
> local and revisable. Critics
> who have detected conflict and ambiguity in Paradise
> Lost were quite right
> after all. The poem's official morality, created by
> one part of Milton's
> brain,"stigmatises and resists the energies, also
> created by the poet and
> expressive of something in him, that would escape
> it". These are welcome
> concessions, and make much of Fish's work on Milton
> redundant. But they do
> not get beyond what Blake said two centuries ago."
>
http://www.sunday-times.co.uk/news/pages/sti/2001/06/24/stibooboo01017.html?
> 999
> 


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