Fashions succeed one another rapidly (Pierre Cardin once defined fashion as that which goes out of fashion), and work that was for a while unchallenged (as to its importance, though not as to its detail)--Leavis, Frye, Blackmur--drops out of view more or less completely. Now and again somebody like Christopher Norris may, ina pious moment, attempt to "recuperate" a particularly brilliant old-style reputation by claiming its owner as a New New Critic avant la lettre--Empson in this case, now to be thought of as having, in his "great theoretical summa," The Structure of Complex Words, anticipated deconstruction. The grumpy old man repudiated this notion with his habitual scorn, calling the work of Derrida (or, as he preferred to call him, "Nerrida") "very disgusting," though showing little sign of having attended to any part of it.
-Frank Kermode, Pleasure, Change and the Canon
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