Journal of Advanced Composition, Volume 14, Number 2, Fall 1994 Page: 330
viii, 316-612 p. : ill. ; 22 cm.View a full description of this periodical.
Extracted Text
The following text was automatically extracted from the image on this page using optical character recognition software:
330 Journal of Advanced Composition
carefully and with just as much intelligence and imagination as you would
read Shakespeare, and they're going to turn out to be interesting from that
point of view. So I'm now changing a little from what I said earlier, not only
saying that new historicism really owes a tremendous amount to linguis-
tically based procedures like deconstruction, but that we can now learn a
lot from them and that there needn't be any insuperable crevasse between
the new historicists and the so-called deconstructionists.
Q. Some theorists in both rhetoric and literary criticism have argued that the
sophists were the philosophical precursors to deconstructionists or that
they were themselves deconstructionists. For example Howard Felperin
writes that "the search for the founder or originator of the discourse of
deconstruction" leads to Gorgias and the pre-socratics: "The first work of
thoroughgoing (what I shall later term 'hard-core') deconstruction to
come down to us, so striking in its wholesale anticipation of the contem-
porary project as to demand reconsideration of the cultural and philo-
sophical context that could have conditioned it, is the fifth-century BC
treatise On Not Being or On Nature by Gorgias, the argument of which was
summarized by Sextus Empiricus: 'Firstly ... nothing exists; secondly...
even if anything exists, it is inapprehensible by man; thirdly ... even if
anything is apprehensible, yet of a surety it is inexpressible and incommu-
nicable to one's neighbour."' Do you agree that the sophists were
deconstruction's forbears?
A. That's Felpie's own winning way of putting things. He was a colleague of
mine at Yale and a friend. I don't think he's got it right. I don't think that
passage characterizes deconstruction at all. He's accepting there, for no
doubt his own purposes, a rather public notion about deconstruction that
doesn't correspond very well to what it is. So, I would disagree with that
way of talking about it. On the other hand, the relationship of the so-called
deconstructionists to the sophists is a complicated one. There's no doubt
that certain aspects of sophistic thinking do anticipate deconstruction a
bit. It would take a bit more working out than Felperin does in that
particular statement. I would put it a slightly different way: Plato not only
gives us a good bit of what we know about the sophists in the dialogue
called the Sophist, but Plato is a kind of lesson himself in the inextricable
relationship between let's say foundationalist and deconstructionist think-
ing. In other words, Plato's dialogues are for me absolutely fascinating
because they contain both of those directions in themselves, not just in the
Sophist but in a dialogue like the Protagoras. I would be more willing to
say that Plato is the founder of deconstruction than to say the sophists
were, partly because we know relatively little about them; we only know
about the sophists primarily what the people on the other side have
allowed us to learn about them. Moreover, the pre-socratics and the
sophists are not at all the same. The relationship of the pre-socratics to
modern thought is very complicated. There's a brilliant young scholar at
Upcoming Pages
Here’s what’s next.
Search Inside
This issue can be searched. Note: Results may vary based on the legibility of text within the document.
Tools / Downloads
Get a copy of this page or view the extracted text.
Citing and Sharing
Basic information for referencing this web page. We also provide extended guidance on usage rights, references, copying or embedding.
Reference the current page of this Periodical.
Association of Teachers of Advanced Composition (U.S.). Journal of Advanced Composition, Volume 14, Number 2, Fall 1994, periodical, 1994; (https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc28611/m1/24/: accessed May 15, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, UNT Digital Library, https://digital.library.unt.edu; .