Teaching the Deconstructive Moment: A History of the Yale School’s Pedagogical Project
Gregory Jones-Katz
Gregory Jones-Katz is an American intellectual and cultural historian. He earned his Ph.D. in American History from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2016. From April to October 2022, Greg joined the Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut Essen (KWI) as an International Fellow. He works in the fields of American intellectual and cultural history, the history of higher education, and the global history of the humanities. Greg’s first book Deconstruction: An American Institution is now available with the University of Chicago Press.
"Teaching the Deconstructive Moment: A History of the Yale School’s Pedagogical Project"
Lecture: March 30th at 4:30pm, Posner Grand Room
This talk will explore an essential avenue through which the influential Yale School performed their deconstructive experiments: classrooms and seminars during the 1970s and early 1980s. Undergraduate and graduate students, as much as their renowned teachers, were key to this pedagogical project, creating the deconstructive moment in America. As this history of Yale courses Literature X, Literature Y, and Literature Z shows, deconstruction was not only "high theory" on the printed page but also a generative conversation in classrooms. This historicization of deconstruction provides a window onto the “linguistic turn,” the postmodern turn, and the “desacralization” of American academic culture—all intellectually significant in the humanities during the closing decades of the last century.
Seminar with Gregory Jones-Katz
Friday, March 31, 2023,12:00-1:15, BH 254Q
Reading: "A Euphoria for (the Neoliberal Politics of) Theory"
Lunch served, registration required.