6 - Pound Studies and the Postmodern Turn, 1980–1990

Summary

Those who practise deconstructive criticism typically see themselves as taking part in an activity which has much more to do with political change than with the “understanding” (much less the “appreciation” of what has traditionally been called “literature”).

—Richard Rorty, “Deconstruction” (1995)

The Theoretical Turn: Derrida against the Traditionalists

AS THE GRAND PROJECTS of explaining and interpreting Pound's major works were unfolding in the 1970s in the framework set by Kenner and Terrell, their critical certitudes would be challenged by the new emphasis on theory in American universities. This theoretical turn would have a major impact on the discipline of Pound studies, which at the beginning of the 1980s was in the process of creating and consolidating its canon of scholarship. Jacques Derrida's destabilizing influence was making itself felt not only in avant-garde philosophical circles, but also within the whole spectrum of the humanities. Its origin could be located in the symposium held at the Johns Hopkins University called “The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man,” organized by Eugenio Donato and Richard Macksey in 1966. Derrida's paper, delivered in French, was the legendary “Structure Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences”: it was translated and published in the volume of conference proceedings The Structuralist Controversy in 1970. Derrida's prestige and influence thereafter continued to grow, popularly mediated by gifted teacher-critics like Paul De Man, J. Hillis Miller, Geoffrey Hartman, Edward Said, and Joseph Riddel, who adapted his ideas from philosophy to literary criticism. A steady stream of translations and two new journals, Diacritics (launched in 1971 at Cornell) and Glyph (1977–1981, published by Johns Hopkins) opened the field for what came to be known as poststructuralism, a concept that in its narrower sense pointed to Derrida's work as it was published and translated, but in its wider acceptance referred to theory-oriented critical texts, including discussions of “fathers” such as Nietzsche, Heidegger, Saussure and Freud, and “sons”: Foucault, Lacan, Deleuze, Baudrillard, and Lyotard. By 1980, poststructuralism was fully established and yielding its critical fruits in new, theoretically informed perspectives on literature, posing the radical provocation of the new method of deconstruction to all traditional approaches.