In Edgar Allan Poe’s story “The Purloined Letter,” the trick is that the incriminating letter is not hidden but has been sitting in plain sight all along. The moral is that what is most obvious is sometimes easiest to overlook, as the vain and frantic efforts of the Prefect of the Parisian Police to recover the missing document attest. Anyone who has had the misfortune to peek into the library of deconstructivist literature knows that Poe’s story is a favorite object of lucubration. The two Jacques, Derrida and Lacan, both devoted many impenetrable pages to the story, as have many of their epigoni.

We thought of Poe’s classic story recently when alerted by a friend to The New York Times’s account of a conference about literary theory sponsored by Critical Inquiry, a hermetic quarterly that has long been home to deconstructionists, post-structuralists, Lacanian-psychoanalyst ...

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