CONSTRUCTIVE POSTMODERNISM: TOWARD RENEWAL IN CULTURAL AND LITERARY STUDIES,
by Martin Schiralli. Westport, Connecticut and London: Bergin & Garvey,
1999, 165pp., $55.
Concerned with the consequences of Jacques Derrida's philosophy of deconstruction
for cultural and literary studies, Martin Schiralli's elegantly written
book offers first a critique of these claims, and then a constructive alternative
analysis. He admires Derrida's brilliantly innovative writing, which as
he rightly notes is "serious and philosophical" even if "even the most patient
reader can easily become disoriented and confused" (p. 24). But even if,
as Derrida argues, Ferdinard de Saussure's theory of meaning is flawed,
we need not—he urges—become deconstructionists. Looking to the work
of Stephen Toulmin, John Dewey, and late Wittgenstein, Schiralli finds suggestive
ways of identifying concerns with cognitive value in literary texts. It
then is possible, he argues, to offer a more reasonable perspective on recent
debates about culture and politics than the recent academic arguments between
"postmodern revisionists…[and] often hostile and defensive traditionalists"
(p. 73).
David Carrier
Case Western Reserve University/
Cleveland Institute of Art
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