The Romantic, religious bent of American critics primed them for French anti-Enlightenment theory
Evidence
It is at least arguable that his later slide into Derridean positions was facilitated by the specifically Heideggerian forms of anti-rationalism. … That Frye, Bloom and de Man were all attracted, in their respective ways, by versions of the irrational, the religious and the Romantic contributed to a structure of feeling in American literary criticism which was implicitly already hostile to rationalism and therefore particularly receptive to sloganeering against the Enlightenment, and so on, when the fashion arrived from Paris. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 88
Categorization
- XREF: This causal account of how a prior intellectual formation disposed critics to accept deconstruction parallels the ‘prepared ground’ argument in the Milgrom law-merchant piece - institutions/practices need enabling prior conditions. — connects to: American pragmatism and French poststructuralism merged to attack Enlightenment rationalism. — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An…, 300
Related
- American pragmatism and French poststructuralism merged to attack Enlightenment rationalism. (similarity 0.83)
- Deconstruction’s rise marked literary criticism’s transition into literary theory. (similarity 0.78)
- Deconstruction and structuralism, not Western Marxism, formed the theoretical ground of 1980s American criticism (similarity 0.78)