Introduction — Literature and Philosophy: The Contemporary Interface

‘The separation of philosophy from literary studies has not worked to the benefit of either.’ An uncontentious statement, surely, and perhaps even a disarming or conciliatory one. Who, after all, would think that segregating literature from philosophy could do anything but delimit and restrict both? And yet, within its original context, this statement formed part of a controversy that would rage for many years. It is taken from the introduction to Deconstruction and Criticism (Hartman, p. ix), a manifesto heralding the arrival and ascendancy of deconstructive thought in America, which featured contributions from all the leading ‘Yale School’ critics (Paul de Man, J. Hillis Miller, Geoffrey Hartman, and Harold Bloom), and from Jacques Derrida himself. Its publication marked the opening salvo in some of the most notorious debates in the so-called ‘theory wars’ of the 1980s.