When French Theory arrived in american literature departments, New Criticism was waiting for it.
Text-focused New Criticism (with its famed "close readings")inculcated some of the same attitudes and critical stances advanced by Barthes's 'Death of the Author' or Michel Foucault's Les Mots et les choses.
Nevertheless, there were differences between the two movements: the New Critical wishes to demonstrate the wholeness of the poem as a complex structure and texture, as a difficult but triumphant balancing act of affirmation and irony; whereas the Deconstructive takes us to the aporias of the text, the radically figural nature of language, its incapacity ever to coincide with the world it wishes to name.
Yet, a critic with a tool full of New Critical tools can easily add the techniques of Deconstruction.
