SOURCE: Findlay, Isobel M. “‘Word-Perfect But Deed-Demented’: Canon Formation, Deconstruction, and the Challenge of D. H. Lawrence.” Mosaic 28, no. 3 (September 1995): 57-81.

In the following essay, Findlay considers Lawrence's Studies in Classic American Literature in light of deconstructionist critical methodology, emphasizing his belief in multiple textual meanings.

In recent decades changing faculty and student bodies and new methodologies have raised questions about the nature and distribution of power and authority, challenging traditional institutional, disciplinary and discursive protocols. Not surprisingly, the consequent reconstitution of English as a discipline—a veritable paradigm shift registered in the 1992 MLA publication Redrawing the Boundaries (Greenblatt and Gunn, eds.)—has occasioned very different responses: read apocalyptically by formalists and literary historians, this reconstitution has been seen as the dangerous politicizing of literary studies and the academy, or even as the end of Western civilization; read approvingly by feminists, poststructuralists and Marxists, it is seen as...