Deconstruction

While the broad outlines of the rise, fury, and fall of deconstruction as a literary and philosophical turn are well known among scholars, in this intellectual history Gregory Jones-Katz aims to transform our understanding of a movement that has been frequently misunderstood, mischaracterized, and left for dead--even as its precepts and influence transformed literary studies and a host of other fields in the humanities. Jones-Katz shows that deconstruction in America--so often ridiculed as a French infection--was equally an American phenomenon, rooted in preexisting political and intellectual tensions, with eventual influence throughout American scholarship, politics, and culture.