Deconstruction and Reader-Response:

The Pedagogical Essay

Thomas Harrison

You never teach what the students think you're teaching; you never
teach what you think you're teaching. We might just as well state
these two axioms as conclusions of both a deconstructive and a reader-
response reflection on pedagogy. The effects of a didactic act are
immeasurable and uncontrollable.
The teacher enters the classroom with a set of theses or texts
which he or she proceeds to articulate. The student attempts to under-
stand these theses, perhaps even to take them at face value. For a
disciplined learner, "face value" usually suggests that which the text
under consideration says in itself, or from a position independent of the
student's own. The student tries to leap into Leopardi's world of con-
cern, into his conceptual and discursive logic. One attempts to bracket
one's personal tastes and every mental inference to become a pure
listener. This, in fact, is the goal of hcrmeneutical understanding as
originally propounded by Schleiermacher in the early 1800s. But the so-
called "face value" of the text, as Schleiermacher's heirs remarked,
including most recently the reception aestheticians, is significant "in
itself only by virtue of what it is not, or by virtue of the constitutive
context of the literary history in which it arises. The good student seeks
the so-called face value of the literary event against an objective
backdrop which only grows in proportion to the depth of inquiry. The
character is made meaningful by the novel, the novel by the writer's
corpus of works, by the laws of genre and of literary convention, and
finally, by the concrete realities to which the materials of the novel are
historically related. In pre-post-structuralist criticism these two opera-
tions tend to account for the whole method of accurate reading: a
respectful deference to the unique specificity of the expressive act, on
the one hand, and a careful positioning of this uniqueness, on the other,
within the generalities to which it is tied.
And yet, the contextualizing process of interpretation also
involves another, more psychic dimension: the subjective constitution
of the reader and of the actual process of reading. This is the new
element in post-structuralist theory which worries the goal of the
hermeneutical project. The model student, to stay with that heuristic
formula, per-forms not two, but also a third operation. He or she
submits the objective material to a specific subjective economy, to a
132 Thomas Harrison

historical consciousness already in place before the textual encounter.

This third operation is not chronologically later than the first and
second, as if it were a final and well-earned act of evaluation. It is the
very condition of their possibility, the means by which they reveal their
ostensible value. The question "What is it to me?" is always implicitly
answered before an inquiry is undertaken. This answer, in the guise of
student interests and preconceptions, supplies part of the basis for the
interpretive act, not only guiding the student's reading but also
informing its method. In the process of both living and reading, the
phcnomenological reduction, or bracketing, of the subject's pragmatic
concerns is never quite possible. And these pre-interpretive conditions
lie beyond the teacher's control.
Professor Whoosis wants to pursue a plan, to convey a
message; he wants to instruct. He devises a syllabus and prepares class
notes. But how can he assure that his objectives are conveyed? How
can be guarantee their reception in the spirit with which they have been
transmitted? The problem is analogous to that of authorial intent,
which had been successfully dispelled from criticism by the New
Critics.1 The students have no more access to the intent of the teacher
than do readers to the intention of a Petrarchan sonnet. They have only
the modes of its articulation, which they will analyze after their
fashion. One might also add that, at least in undergraduate classes, it is
usually not the content of one's statements that is likely to interest
students but their import, a question pedagogues very often suppress.
Students gather this import from a scries of gestures and signs rather
than from the pure information transmitted. As Castiglione and
Machiavelli need continuously remind us, it is style and form that are
most rhetorically persuasive. And the mask of the pedagogue is a
particularly unattractive one.
Professor Whoosis has no more access to the underlying intent
of his lesson than do the students, as Professor Michasiw argued earlier
today, even when he consciously limits himself to positivistic expo-
sition. For what the teacher conveys is always already an interpre-
tation, a "percolation," which can be just as easily personal as highly
conventional (the percolation of one's teacher's percolations, which were
in turn some other teacher's, back to the rather anonymous body of
commonplaces called literary history). Either I read myself à propos of
Leopardi or I attempt to depict Leopardi as an independent, extra-
personal phenomenon (usually interpretation occurs as a sway between
these poles). In neither case do I speak of why I have chosen to study
particularly these poems, of what it is in me or my background that
informs my reading, of why I am a teacher at all, and of what I am
trying to accomplish with all this instruction. I am never teaching
what I think I am leaching, and students arc never learning what they
think they arc learning.
 Deconstruction and Reader-Response 133

Both deconstruction and reader-response reorient the discipline

of literary study around this question of reading. This is the stone in the
shoe, the oft-resented complication of the sciences on the part of post-
structuralist theory. Deconstruction calls this reading writing, for the
same operation is involved in each. The writer is already a reader, not a
reader of the world or of immediate meanings as in the medieval view,
but a reader of words transcribing such meaning. In the deconstructive
view, the writer's work has always already been partially done by the
differential system of signs to which intentions must harken, a system
which is not only prior to meaning but not fully receptive to it. Mea-
ning is an instrument of writing, not vice versa. Once this rhetorical or
grammatological foundation of the literary act is analyzed, one finds
that to speak of the theme of a work, or of its conceptual system, or of
its position on any one of the large questions of life is to take a
phantasm for reality.
Deconstruction deepens the analysis of the work's linguistic
surface, developing the New Critical attention to the rhetorical
strategies of a text to the point where paraphrase is not only a heresy
but an downright madness.2 To use a distinction from Pirandello, in
New Critical analyses the perception of contradiction that yields a sense
of irony, tension, and dramatic conflict has not gone so far as to
produce to & feeling of contradiction.3 This feeling of contradiction,
which Pirandello calls humor, is analogous to perversion in Deleuze;
comedy and irony are only subversion, treating the two terms of an
opposition as separate.4 New Critical analyses of literary expression
have not progressed to the point of reflecting on the implications of
tensions of signification. When such reflection occurs, one loses the
ability to resolve oppositions dialcctically. It is then that deconstruction
is allowed to arise.
To deconstruct a text is therefore not to comment or to
interpret a work, but to theorize its means of signification.5 For the
writer "writes in a language and in a logic whose proper system, laws,
and life his discourse by definition cannot dominate absolutely.... And
the reading must always aim at a certain relationship, unperceivcd by
the writer, between what he commands and what he docs not command
of the patterns of the language that he uses. This relationship," Derrida
continues, is "a signifying structure that critical reading should
produce."6 It follows that the traditional conception of criticism as a
faithful doubling of the text, or as a reproduction of the writer's
conscious and voluntary relationship with history by means of
language, must be surpassed (ibid.).
The rather simple idea that the significance of the text is
governed by reading spurs the inquiries of both reader-response and
reception aesthetics.7 If, for deconstruction, the decisive factors in a
text were located in the difference between the interpretive conventions
13 4 Thomas Harrison

by which one tends to double the ostensible meanings of the work and
the semiotic structures to which such conventions are applied, the
decisive factors for reader-response lie in the differences among such
interpretive conventions themselves. Such conventions are now the
ultimate basis for each and every construal of meaning. Lacking all
objectivity, "the text in itself" is meaningless.8 Not that a poem is not
composed of a very specific arrangement of words, but that even a
definition of the work's formal properties depends on a critical decision.
Even that kind of stylistic écart which Riffaterre explains as an
objective catalyst for poetic response is a perceptual result of an
interpretive convention. 9 One might say that what reader-response
brings to the deconstructive enterprise, for which it bears marked
sympathy, is the question of how significative structures are identified
to begin with, or how they become a problem in the first place.
Literature is no longer contained on the page; it is an experience
occurring in the mind. Unlike the treatment of this issue on the part of
Iscr and Jauss, the actual repertoire of a text is not the final, decisive
factor. That is why the particularly American approach to the construal
of meaning which is called reader-response takes a turn toward the
psychological, pragmatic, and political constitution of both collective
and private interpreters, particularly in the work of David Bleich,
Norman Holland, and some versions of feminism.10
The pedagogical ramifications of deconstruction and reader-
response, as indeed of the entire spectrum of post-structuralist theory
from Barthes and Foucault to feminism and Lacan, extend far beyond
the classroom.11 They begin, as is clear by now, with an obliteration
of the autonomy of the work and of interpretive authority. Both schools
see the literary parole as necessarily inscribed within a langue, whether
this langue be the interpretive conventions of the reader, the rhetorical
context of literary history, or all this and more-lhat is, the entire
history of discursive practices in which literature itself is only a parole.
Given this situation, one would want to ask how the very institution of
literature is established as a privileged arena of expression, and how it
relates to those other modes of inscription which are politics, gender,
economics, emotion, and religion. Literature would no longer seem to
be independent from discursive practices at large, as once in Kantian
fashion. It would appear to be as contaminated by them as they by
fictionalizing devices. One would begin to measure the rhetoric of
literature by political grammars and political grammars by rhetoric.
Institutions of reading, authors, and privileged interpreters would
underlie the whole question of textual transmission.
The inquiry into canon formation, which has led a number of
schools to change their core curriculum and which presages, I think, a
mimetic response on the part of other pedagogical institutions, would
not have been possible without deconstruction and reader-response. But
 Deconstruction and Reader-Response 135

even where the curriculum has not yet changed, one wonders whether it
is still possible to teach a set of texts without asking why they have
been selected; who is acting as authoritative interpreter; how these texts
are "representative," and of what; what exactly, in the writing or in us
as readers, evokes consensus or disagreement; what is involved in "tea-
ching" these texts. To engage such questions in the classroom is not to
veer from the proper object of literary study. It is to inquire into the
mechanics of symbolic significance, into the power of metaphor and of
narrative organization-in short, into the devices already at work in the
text at hand, but whose ramifications are greater than marks on paper.
With langue as the backdrop of every parole, the categorical
distinction between the literal and figurative (between what Professor
Barilli earlier called rhetoric and logic) becomes a problem. Literature
would either lose its specificity or turn into the discipline of all
disciplines, the audacious leader of discursive invention, as Vattimo and
others have claimed.12 In the first case, literary study would have to
reappraise its subject, in such a way, for instance, that a course in
nineteenth century Italian literature might come to include journalistic
jargon, forms of logical argumentation, governmental reports, social
cliches, folk music, and the system of economic organization. In the
second case, the study of literature would turn into an analysis of ruling
metaphors, governing tropes, the very modalities of cultural rhetoric
and discursive formation. However, in both cases the issue would
remain interpretation, its means of operation and historical force. And
there is no reason why the study of a sanctified, canonical text could not
yield the very same questions as an altered curriculum; but it would
require a new understanding of the scene of teaching.
Instruction would still be necessary —for the many methods of
reading are there to be taught— but would become admittedly subordi-
nate to education: a leading out, and away, of the mind. A student reads
herself into the character of a novel? So be it. She brings all her
preconceptions to a reading of The Prince? So be that as well. For the
text under analysis now has doubled; it is no longer The Prince but
discourse about The Prince that is the thing to master. Now it is the
exchange between students and text, teacher and text, students and
teacher which is at stake — a mutual reading and writing, which the
teacher can never exactly predict, but must analyze at every moment as
best as possible. Only within this reading are pedagogical effects
obtained. And that is why I spoke of education in contrast to instruc-
tion. Every good pedagogue, from Socrates through the psychoanalytic
therapist, is an anti-pedagogue, as Felman has argued — a teacher by
indirection.13 The teacher's first task is to disturb discursive formations,
to actively destroy rhetorical stasis and verbal mechanization.
If the scene of a classroom is that of a mutual reading, it must
be openly that. The genre of this text would be an essay — a flexible
136 Thomas Harrison

and developing form, which, though it has a heuristic aim and a

plurality of decisive methods, cannot predict its end result. The essay of
a class is indeed dialogical, as the hermeneutical theorists have
persuasively argued, but not only that. Taught in in a deconstructive,
self-interpretive mode, the class would not achieve that synthetic
harmony, or filling in of gaps, which reception theory imagines in the
act of dialogue. Rather, the class would open those gaps. Pedagogy is
not transmission of knowledge; it is the deliberate scrambling of
knowledge's codes. The students must be shaken, to see what loosens
and drops out. To this end, the teacher must be a Cagliostro, an
intellectual Pied Piper, seducing the students away from conscious
stasis, only to change direction once this direction seems to have been
found, or to abandon students in regions with which they are
unfamiliar. The mask of the pedagogue will no doubt be useful, but
primarily to serve an anti-pedagogical function: a subtle critique of the
fixed and unessayistic.
For the class to become an essay, it must be a scene of reading
from the start, not a platform for a single, boring, onesided academic
disquisition. The goal would no longer be to instill in the mind of the
other an order of conceptual repetition but to engage in original
thinking. A flexible relation must be established with the students, a
partial adoption of their forms of language and even a willingness to
become their pupil. Those appropriated linguistic forms must then be
cleverly diverted, perverted, in the manner, say, of a master ironist, a
Karl Kraus. For literature is nothing if not a critique of language.
The force of metaphor, the power of example, twists of
humor, the multiplicities of rhetoric and conflicting jargons—these must
replace that academese which is the death not only of language but also
of students. The objectification of the other must cease and cede to a
mutual disorientation, to the courage to admit that one does not know,
as occurs in the readings of deconstruction and reader-response (contrary
to the claims of Professor O'Neill this morning). As Nietzsche,
Kierkegaard, Freud, and every good pedagogue has always known,
instruction is simply ineffective. It fails to make use of the lessons of
rhetoric it is trying to teach. Education must begin with a renewal of
language and its discursive possibilities, with an essay it is time for
academics to make — and thereby stimulate the interest of their
students.

University of Pennsylvania
 Deconstruction and Reader-Response 137

NOTES

1. W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley, "The Intentional Fallacy"in

W. K. Wimsatt, The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of
Poetry (Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press, 1954),
p p . 3-18.
2. On New Criticism's view of paraphrase see Cleanth Brooks, "The
Heresy of Paraphrase," in The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the
Structure of Poetry (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1947),
p p . 192-214. On deconstruction as partially an extension of
techniques developed by N e w Criticism see Jonathan Culler,
"Changes in the Study of the Lyric," in Lyric Poetry: Beyond
New Criticism, ed. Chaviva Hosek and Patricia Parker (Ithaca and
London: Cornell University Press, 1985), pp. 38-54.
3. Luigi Pirandello, On Humor, trans. Antonio Illiano and Daniel P.
Testa (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1974).
4. Gilles Deleuze, Logique du sens (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1969),
pp.152-166.1 am grateful to Professor Jacques Daignault for
calling the passages from Deleuze to my attention.
5. Paul de Man notes, in his essay "Resistance to Theory," that literary
theory comes into being when the object of discussion is no
longer meaning and value but the modalities of the production and
reception of meaning and value, prior to their establishment. See
The Pedago-gical Imperative: Teaching as a Literary Genre,
special issue of Yale French Studies, 63 (1982), ed. Barbara
Johnson, p . 7.
6. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
(Baltimore and London: T h e Johns Hopkins University Press,
1976), p . 158.
7. Reception aesthetics is the hermeneutically based study of the reader's
constitutive role in the literary experience, traceable above all to
the inspiration of Hans Georg Gadamer and Roman Ingarden. See
Hans Robert Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, trans.
Timothy Bahti (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1982) and his Aesthetic Experience and Literary Hermeneutics,
trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1982); Wolfgang Iser, The Implied Reader: Patterns of
Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett
(Baltimore: T h e Johns Hopkins Uni-versity Press, 1974) and his
The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore:
T h e Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978). For the polemical
responses of both deconstruction and reader-response to reception
aesthetics, see, once again, Paul de Man's "Resistance to Theory,"
op. cit. and his Introduction to Jauss's Toward an Aesthetic of
Reception, op. cit.; Stanley Fish, "Why No One's Afraid of
Wolfgang Iser," Diacritics 11 (1981). Iser's reply is in Diacritics
11 (1981).
8. See T o m p k i n s ' discussion in Reader-response Criticism: From
Formalism to Post-structuralism, ed. Jane P. Tompkins (Baltimore:
The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), pp. ix-xxvi.
138 Thomas Harrison

9. For Michael Riffaterre's most complete exposition of his theory of

poetry see his Semiotics of Poetry (Bloomington: Indiana Uni-
versity Press, 1978) as well as "Describing Poetic Structures," in
Reader-Response Criticism, op. cit. pp. 26-40.
10. David Bleich, Readings and Feelings: An Introduction to Subjective
Criticism (Urbana, Illinois: National Council of Teachers of
English, 1975) and Subjective Criticism (Baltimore: T h e J o h n s
Hopkins University Press, 1978); N o r m a n N . Holland, The
Dynamics of Literary Response (New York: Oxford U n i v e r s i t y
Press, 1968) and his Poems in Persons: An Introduction to the
Psychoanalysis of Literature (New York: Norton, 1973); Judith
Fetterly, The Resisting Reader (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1978); Mary J a c o - b u s, Reading Woman: Essays in
Feminist Criticism (New York: Columbia University P r e s s ,
1986); Teresa de Lauretis, Alice Doesn't: Feminism, Semiotics,
Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984) and her
Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987).
11. For a good bibliography of American writings on deconstruction and
pedagogy, see footnote 14 of Vincent B . Leitch, "Deconstruction
and Pedagogy," in Theory in the Classroom, ed. Cary Nelson
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), pp. 45-56. For
r e a d e r - r e s p o n s e , see, in addition to footnote 10 above, t h e
selection in Reader-response Criticism, op. cit., and Stanley Fish,
Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive
Communities (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980).
12. Gianni Vattimo, "Verità e retorica nell'ontologia ermeneutica," in La
fine della modernità (Milan: Garzanti, 1985), pp. 138-52.
13. Shoshana Felman, "Psychoanalysis and Education: Teaching Termi-
nable and Interminable," in The Pedagogical Imperative, op. cit.,
p p . 21-44.