Though ostensibly a metainstitutional reflection, Theory at Yale carries important insights for Romantic studies, intellectual history of the 1960s-80s, and all literary scholars interested in the evolution of the discipline... At a moment where rhetoric has all but vanquished reason, preponderance of evidence, and empathy in the public arena, Redfield soberly reminds us of the tempting but fallacious urge to ... Read morepersonify as a revenge strategy.
Modern Language Notes
The first book-length history of the Yale school of literary criticism, which included figures like Harold Bloom and Paul de Man, examines the process through which European theory entered the United States in the 1970s and 1980s.
-Publishers Weekly
Was the Yale School a media creation? Marc Redfield here offers us both a shrewd account of the quite different contributions of Geoffrey Hartman, Harold Bloom, and Paul de Man to literary studies, and a smart, subtle, analysis of the myth of the `Yale School' and its fortunes in the culture wars. An invigorating retrospective on an important chapter in American intellectual history which is not yet over.
-Jonathan Culler
Cornell University
Also author of The Rhetoric of Terror: Reflections on 9/11 and the War on Terror (2009) and editor of Legacies of Paul de Man (2007), Redfield has produced an important and ambitious book...
-Choice Magazine
Here is one similarity between de Man and Derrida: their work's uncanny capacity to anticipate and undermine in advance attempts to denigrate it, to the point that these wind up being unwitting recommendations of the methodology they want to dispute. This pattern, so exciting and maddening in the first place, is elucidated admirably by Redfield's impressive meditation.
-Review 31
Lucid, erudite, and theoretically sophisticated... The virtue of Theory at Yale lies not only in its expert handling of its archives, but in its understanding that the explanatory dimensions of such treatment constitute a theoretical wager.
-Romantic Circles
Marc Redfield's Theory at Yale provides an absorbing account of the so-called Yale school of deconstruction, whose chief luminaries were Paul de Man, Harold Bloom, Geoffrey Hartman and J. Hillis Miller...it is rich in insight and information
Terry Eagleton
-Times Literary Supplement
This is the most informative and accurate book I have read, or ever expect to read, on the `Yale Critics' phenomenon. It's completely free of both the bad faith and the idolatry that plague any and all other accounts.
-Paul Fry
Yale University
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