Deconstruction and structuralism, not Western Marxism, formed the theoretical ground of 1980s American criticism

Evidence

Northrop Frye, Wallace Stevens, Frank Kermode, Jean-Paul Sartre, Georges Fouler, Marrin Heidegger, Ferdinand de Saussure, Claude Levi-Strauss, Roland Barrhes, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault have largely set the terms and themes of recent critical controversies in the country. Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Georg Lukacs, Antonio Gramsci, Louis Althusser, Lucien Goldmann, and ochers in their tradition have a great deal to say to American critics, bur in the period I have chosen ro study they have not been shaping influences. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 239

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: New Criticism’s rise and fall tracked McCarthy-era anti-communism; Deconstruction’s rise marked literary criticism’s transition into literary theory. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 230; American deconstruction stripped political radicalism from French theory into a hermetic textual technology. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 229 (+1 more)