The Yale school is a colloquial name for an influential group of literary critics, theorists, and philosophers of literature that were influenced by Jacques Derrida's philosophy of deconstruction. Many of the theorists were affiliated with Yale University in the late 1970s, although a number of the theorists — including Derrida himself — subsequently moved to or became affiliated with the University of California at Irvine.
As a school of thought, the Yale School is more closely allied with the post-structuralist dimensions of deconstruction as opposed to its phenomenological dimensions. Additionally, the Yale School is more similar to the 1970s version of deconstruction that John D. Caputo has described as a "Nietzschean free play of signifiers" and not the 1990s version of deconstruction that was far more concerned with political and ethical questions.
During the period between the late 1960s and the early 1980s, Yale University was the home of a variety of thinkers who were indebted to deconstruction. The group included high-profile literary scholars such as Paul de Man, Geoffrey Hartman, J. Hillis Miller, and Harold Bloom. This group came to be known as the Yale School and was especially influential in literary criticism because de Man, Miller, Hartman and Bloom are all considered to be prominent literary critics. The four critics listed above, along with Derrida, contributed to an influential anthology, Deconstruction and Criticism. However, Harold Bloom's position was always somewhat different from that of the rest of the group, and he later distanced himself from deconstruction.