SOURCE: Sheppard, Richard. “The Poetry of August Stramm: A Suitable Case for Deconstruction.” Journal of European Studies 15, no. 60 (December 1985): 261-94.

In the following essay, Sheppard offers a deconstructivist analysis of the works of Stramm.

Prone though it is to mystify its logical procedures and to justify that mystification by implicitly suggesting that anything less than unintelligibility is a surreptitious concession to Western logocentrism (cf. ref. 36 below), the contemporary cult of Deconstruction is teaching the literary-critic-in-the-street four very practical lessons: to become aware of and hence relativize the assumptions and rhetoric which derive from a specific (Platonic) tradition of metaphysics; to abandon, as a result of that, the assumption that a writer is in control of his/her work; to listen for those junctures where a text, eluding such control, ‘undoes’ itself; and to focus upon precisely those elements which have been excluded from the consensus view of a...