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How did deconstruction become influential in American literary criticism?

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Antique book open to the frontispiece of The Iliad of Homer, showing the title and an engraved portrait of a bearded man, with old books in the background. — literature *The Iliad*, an epic of the Trojan War attributed to the ancient Greek poet Homer, is considered a foundational work of Western literature.

Deconstruction became influential in American literary criticism during the 1970s and 1980s, primarily through the work of the Yale school, a group of critics that included Paul de Man and J. Hillis Miller.12

Drawing inspiration from the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, these scholars applied deconstructive methods to challenge the established norms of New Criticism. While New Criticism viewed literary works as self-contained, harmonious artifacts, deconstructive readings treated texts as sites of intractable conflict between literal and figurative meanings. By examining the rhetorical and performative aspects of language, deconstructionists sought to expose how texts implicitly undermine the very categories used to analyze them.324

This approach played a major role in transforming literary studies into "theory," shifting the focus toward questions about the nature of language, the production of meaning, and the relationship between literature and other discourses. Despite facing significant opposition from critics who labeled the movement as nihilistic or apolitical, deconstruction fundamentally altered the landscape of American intellectual life by fostering a deep skepticism toward established categories and the possibility of objective truth.324