Martin Heidegger's philosophical thought has been a guiding presence on the European continent for half a century, having influenced virtually every area of the human sciences from psychology to art in what must be called a revolutionary way. And, yet, a meaningful understanding of the enormous importance of his thinking, especially of his unmethodical methodological impulse, which informs the more immediately appealing "existential analytic" in Being and Time (Sein und Zeit, 1927) and his later ontological meditations in such texts as Holzwege (1936–46), Vorträge und Aufsätze (1936–53), Gelassenheit (1944–55), and Unterwegs zur Sprache (1950–59), is still limited in the United States and England to a small community of philosophers who have responded to the crisis of the human sciences. This is the case despite the important ground broken by the American schools of theology, above all by Union Theological Seminary during the postwar (Tillichean) period, and, more recently, by publishers such as Harper and Row and Northwestern University Press, which have made translations of this work and commentary on it available to Anglo-American scholars.
It is true, of course, that along with the recent emergence of a sense of the crisis of knowledge, Heidegger's presence is now coming to be felt, however tentatively, by some American scholars professing the other humanities, especially literary studies. But this Heidegger, by and large, is the one appropriated, by way of Friedrich Nietzsche, by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida and the Belgian literary critic Paul de Man and their followers—critics such as J. Hillis Miller, Joseph N. Riddel, Eugenio Donato, Samuel Weber, among others. He is, in other words, the deconstructed Heidegger, "saved" from the metaphysics that, according to them, it was his project to de-center and surpass, but which he failed to accomplish. He is the "post-Structuralist" Heidegger, who, finally, points the way to deconstructive literary criticism, the free-play of a decentered écriture against the logocentric parole. However viable this appropriation of Heideggerian thought may be … the fact remains that Heidegger's work itself has not "spoken" to American literary critics directly. It is, therefore, the purpose of this "gathering" of essays [Martin Heidegger and the Question of Literature: Toward A Postmodern Literary Hermeneutics (edited by Spanos)] not only to introduce Heidegger's destructive hermeneutic thinking as it pertains to the question of literary interpretation and criticism to the serious writers, readers, interpreters, and critics of literature in the English-speaking world, but also to suggest, by way of example, some of the significant aspects of the problematic distinction—not yet made explicit, as far as I know—between the phenomenological Heidegger and the post-Structuralist Heidegger, that is, between the "destructive" and "deconstructive" possibilities for literary hermeneutics that his thought has opened up.
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