A quick and informative article about the life of American literary critic M.H. Abrams (includes a really short but sharp statement re: deconstruction):

Through the 1970s and 80s, he sorted through and questioned new schools of literary theory like deconstruction and theorists like Stanley Fish and Jacques Derrida, whom he found compelling but disagreed with. He adds, “I’ve been skeptical from the beginning of attempts to show that for hundreds of years people have missed the real point,” his chief quarrel with contemporary theory.

I’m chasing an interesting and abstract thought re: the philosophical relationship between postmodernism, liberal religious pluralism, and ethics. I’ll begin with a fantastic quote by Stanley Hauerwas. The following excerpt is from The Peaceable Kingdom:

“All ethical reflection occurs relative to a particular time and place. Not only do ethical problems change from one time to the next, but the very nature and structure of ethics is determined by the particularities of a community’s history and convictions. From this perspective the notion of ‘ethics’ is misleading, since it seems to suggest that ‘ethics’ is an identifiable discipline that is constant across history. In fact, much of the burden of this book will be to suggest that ethics always requires an adjective of qualifier - such as, Jewish, Christian, Hindu, Existentialist, Pragmatic, Utilitarian, Humanist, Medieval, Modern - in order to denote the social and historical character of ethics as a discipline. This is not to suggest that ethics does not address an identifiable set of relatively constant questions - the nature of good or right, freedom and the nature of human behavior, the place and status of rules and virtues - but any response to these questions necessarily draws on the particular convictions of historic communities to whom such questions may have significantly different meanings.” Read More »