Barbara Johnson investigates the significant and illuminating ways in which both literature and criticism are "critically different" from what they purport to be. Her subtle and provocative studies of Balzac, Mallarme, Baudelaire, Apollinaire, Melville, Poe, Barthes, Lacan, Austin, and Derrida take a refreshing new approach to the fundamental questions of meaning, interpretation, and the relationship between literature and criticism. In each of seven essays, a clear, precise, and detailed reading of the rhetoric of one or more literary or critical works reveals the text's fundamental discrepancies, ambiguities, and contradictions. If rhetoric is seen as language's capacity to differ from literal statement, and if "to differ" can also mean "to disagree, " then the reading of the rhetoric of literature and theory here is an attempt to capture the logic of a text's own disagreement with itself.

About the Author

Barbara Johnson is professor of French and comparative literature at Harvard University. She is author of Defigurations du langage poetique and translator of Jacques Derrida's La Dissemination.

Reviews
When it is done well, deconstructive criticism can be a pleasure to read, as it is in the case of Barbara Johnson. Her discussions of the reading process... are patient, ingenious, and persuasive. -- Robert Scholes Yale Review When it is done well, deconstructive criticism can be a pleasure to read, as it is in the case of Barbara Johnson. Her discussions of the reading process... are patient, ingenious, and persuasive. -- Robert Scholes Yale Review



Book Information
ISBN 9780801827280
Author Barbara Johnson
Format Paperback
Page Count 168
Imprint Johns Hopkins University Press
Publisher Johns Hopkins University Press
Weight(grams) 227g