SOURCE: Hill, Archibald A. “Deconstruction and Analysis of Meaning in Literature.” In Language and Cultures: Studies in Honor of Edgar C. Palomé, edited by Mohammad Ali Jazayery and Werner Winter, pp. 279-85. Berlin, Germany: Walter de Gruyter, 1988.

In the following essay, Hill discusses Hartman's deconstructionist interpretation of selected poems and posits that deconstructionist critics confuse textual with contextual meaning.

As an academic who has spent a good many years in teaching both literature and linguistics, and in watching and even participating in literary and linguistic analysis, I can not help being repelled by some of the recent developments in literary study. I refer to that school of litterateurs who call themselves deconstructionist, revisionist, or hermeneutical critics. The school certainly has attracted a great deal of attention, even notoriety.¹ I believe that any one who reads such manifestos of this school as Deconstruction and Criticism, or Criticism in the...