Research Guide to American Literature

La Voix et le phénomène: Introduction au problème du signe dans la phénoménologie de
Husserl (translated as Speech and Phenomena, and Other Essays on Husserl ’s Theory
of Signs, 1973), De la grammatologie (translated as Of Grammatology, 1976), and
L’écriture et la différence (translated as Writing and Difference, 1978). Derrida’s
notion of reading a text challenges its surface or intended meaning by uncovering
its latent, hidden, or “accidental” features. Like New Criticism, deconstruction
calls for line-by-line examination of the text, but it rejects New Critical notions
about literature’s aesthetic unity, universal meaning, and the primacy of the
author. These ideas contributed to the “death of the author” movement initiated
by Roland Barthes’s landmark essay “The Death of the Author” (1967), in which
he argues that an “author” is not a biological person but a socially and historically
constructed subject who does not exist outside of language. In other words, writ-
ing creates the author and not the other way around.
Questioning the primacy of the author led to reader-response criticism. In “Is
There a Text in This Class?” (1980) Stanley Fish argues that a text does not have
an objective meaning; instead, the reader collaborates with the writer to create the
meaning in the process of interpretation. New Historicism, represented by Ste-
phen Greenblatt, Catherine Gallagher, Joel Feinman, and Louis Montrose, takes
its cue from poststructuralism in its breaking down of the distinction between
literary and nonliterary texts. New Historicists examine novels, poems, and plays
alongside previously marginalized materials such as maps, letters, diaries, adver-
tisements, and unofficial versions of historical events. They also argue that catego-
ries previously deemed “natural,” such as the superiority of a William Wordsworth
poem or racial or sexual identity, are socially and historically constructed.
The French feminist critics Hélène Cixous, Julia Kristeva, and Luce Irigaray,
whose ideas profoundly influenced their American counterparts in the 1970s
and 1980s, argued that female experience could not be adequately represented
by male-formulated discourses marked by linear and rational thought processes.
Cixous’s formulation écriture feminine (feminine writing) refers to writing that
emerges from the female body and its biological rhythms and is distinct from
male writing in its nonlinearity.
Similar arguments have emerged in African American studies, Asian Ameri-
can studies, Native American studies, Latino/Latina studies, and postcolonial
studies, all of which are grouped under the umbrella “cultural studies” or “cultural
criticism.” These critics analyze power relationships, share a commitment to social
justice, and challenge a literary canon composed mostly of the works of white
male writers. Those who are interested in race and sexuality focus on the ways
these categories have been shaped socially and historically rather than biologi-
cally; those who study minority literature investigate images and ways of reading
that are specific to the cultures from which they emerge, as opposed to Western
or Anglo perspectives. In postcolonial studies Edward Said’s groundbreaking
Orientalism (1978) demonstrates the ways in which Western writers represent
the Middle East as antithetical to European progress and values—as “other.” All
of these critics share a desire for literary and social pluralism and the elimination
of borders between groups defined by class, race, gender, and sexuality. Green
cultural studies, or “ecocriticism”—a term coined in the 1970s to describe literary

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