Deconstructing Deconstruction

John Ellis' Against Deconstruction (1989) began it; Denis Dutton's review article (http://www.denisdutton.com) added further fuel; another book from Ellis - Literature Lost: Social Agendas & the Corruption of the Humanities (1997) kept the fire going although it appears to be far from a raging inferno since the halls of literary academia in many countries still resound with deconstructive activity, oblivious to the shortcomings of Derridean theorizing... I wonder at the impact of Ellis' call for a return to rationality; a call which should be highlighted because of the major flaws in deconstructive thinking which media writeups on Derrida - assuming that it is still fashionable to be Derridean - show little awareness of.
Among these are:
1 The fact that deconstruction introduces impossibilities in
the implementation of the evaluation of the work; for
instance, how do we compare texts when there are an
infinite number of texts arising from the original?
Ranking texts as major or minor, good or weak would
be irrelevant since the text resides in the responses
of individual readers; we would be embarking
on the quixotic exercise of comparing an infinite
cluster of texts with another infinite cluster of
texts. The work of English departments would
be rendered irrelevant...
2 Again, the ossified traditional critical account
that deconstructionists look for in order to provide
the counter critical account would be impossible to
locate since there is no convenient single traditional
account to select as there is a multiplicity of accounts
to contend with.
3 Derridean thinking simplifies the opposition
seeing it as upholding the single interpretation as the
ideal when the'consensus of critics for some time has
been that literary texts are inexhaustible' & do not have
single meanings.
4 The extraction and reification of the prose content of
the literary work - which reduces art to a political,
historical or sociological tract. Art is reduced to content or
message which implies that a distinctive literary meaning is
non-existent - which in turn implies that reading a literary
text is not much different from reading a history, geography
or social studies text which eventually means that literary studies
as a separate discipline would no longer be viable... although this
would not appear to be a relevant consideration in this context.