00128--What has Abrams to tell Hills Miller Who is a deconstructive angel.

            Abrams says that as a deconstructive angel Hillis Miller is not serious, as in Hegel's sense of the term, that is, he does not entirely and consistently commit himself to the consequences of his premises.  He is a double agent who plays the game of language by two very different sets of rules.  One of the games he  plays is that of a deconstructive critic of literary texts.  The other is the game he will play in a minute or two when he steps out of his grapho centric premises and begins to talk.  Abrams makes a prediction as to what Miller is going to do in the symposium.  He will have determinate things to say and will masterfully exploit the resources of language to express there things clearly and forcibly.  He will present things without any theoretical difficulties.  People who have read and admired his recent writings will be surprised and delighted by peculiarities of what he says.  Abrams says that before presenting his speech Miller works his speech in the form of writing.  He delivers it and then again publishes for the public.  This substitution of written from by speech will certainly make a difference.  Each of his readers will be able to reconvert the black-on-blanks back to speech, which he will hear in his mind's ear; he will perceive the words not simply as marks nor as sounds, but as already invested with meaning.

00126--What is Abram's basic difference of opinion with Deconstruction? OR How doe Abrams disagree with Derrida?

MH Abram

            Structuralism proved that meaning evolves out of differences from other signs in a semantic chain.  Post structuralists too it to its extreme and claimed that this chain is endless.  hence the final meaning is impossible.  The process of finding difference is always deferred as well.  Derrida coined the portmanteau  term Differance.  The term suggests to differ' and 'to defer'.  Deconstructionists hold that communicating through language is rather impossible.  In "The Deconstructive Angel", Abrams defend the ability of traditional historical criticism to discover what literary works might have meant to their contemporaries.  They can also grasp what they mean today.  To prove this, he compares his own interpretation to those of other interpretations.  These combined approximations will "confirm the 'objectivity' of his own interpretation".  Abrams admits the ambiguity of literary language, sharing the ideas of Barthes.  Abram is comfortable with linguistic theories that see language as pluralistic or ambiguous.  But he cannot agree with the violent claims of Deconstruction.  To quote him:  "deconstruction goes beyond the limits of pluralism, by making impossible anything that we would account as literary and cultural history".