How did deconstruction change literary studies in the United States during the 1970s and 1980s?

In the United States during the 1970s and 1980s, deconstruction fundamentally transformed literary studies by shifting the focus toward "theory"—an interdisciplinary concern with the nature of language, the production of meaning, and the relationship between literature and broader social discourses.1

This movement challenged the established methods of New Criticism, which had previously viewed literary works as self-contained, harmonious artifacts. Instead, deconstructive readings:1

• Treated texts as sites of intractable conflict between literal and figurative meanings rather than as unified wholes.1
• Analyzed works as products of complex relations with other texts and discourses rather than as isolated objects.1
• Examined how texts implicitly critiqued the very categories critics used to analyze them.1

Much of this influence was driven by the Yale school, a group of critics including Paul de Man and J. Hillis Miller who drew inspiration from the French philosopher Jacques Derrida. By the 1980s, deconstruction had expanded beyond literature into a wide range of radical theoretical enterprises across the humanities and social sciences.23