262
PARTISAN REVIEW
the deconstructionist Frank Lentricchia, in his book,
After the New
Criticism
(1980) :
As a theorist who speaks unapologetically for rational values,
E. D. Hirsch stands pretty much by himself in the landscape of
contemporary theory.
No more devastating reflection on the academic response to decon–
struction could be made .
The supine intellectual posture of the academics will be fa–
miliar to anyone who recalls the variety of capitulations with which
they had greeted the student movement out of which deconstruction
grew . In the face of that assault, professors had swiftly abandoned
their central pedagogical and scholarly convictions . They conceded
that authority was by its nature coercive and that subjective impres–
sions were as valuable as reasoned analysis. Once the countercul–
tural assault had receded, the professors restored the status quo
ante . They dropped the experimental courses they had begun to of–
fer , returned to the traditional curriculum, and once again found
reasons to demand academic work in exchange for academic grades .
But capitulations have their consequences . The edifice had been
shaken , and few were any longer confident about the solidarity of its
underpinnings.
At present deconstruction, a product of the second, professorial
wave of the student movement, promises to recede from importance
in its turn . But if deconstruction failed to dislodge society's sense of
reality, it was only because that sense proved to be ineradicably en–
grained in human nature. Once again the academics responsible for
standards in their profession have been little more than bystanders
as developments ran their own course. The Marxists undoubtedly
have a point when they attribute the failure of deconstruction in part
to its having been institutionalized by the academy, for it is true that
deconstructionists have been published, favorably reviewed, ten–
ured, and promoted - all in an academic spirit of bland receptivity
that has had the ironic effect of softening the movement's impact. It
is hard , though, to take encouragement from the Marxist critic who
attacked Gerald Graffs
Literature Against Itself
by expressing his dis–
may at a "growing reactionary movement in the academy to recover
the ideals of logic, reason, and determinate meaning and to repudi–
ate the radicalism of the sixties and early seventies ." No such move–
ment has ever developed.
