The Wake of Deconstruction (Bucknell Lectures in Literary Theory) - Softcover

Johnson, Barbara

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0631189637 ISBN 13: 9780631189633

Verlag: Blackwell Publishers, 1994

Inhaltsangabe

Is deconstruction dead? Was it ever alive? These are the questions discussed in Barbara Johnson's The Wake of Deconstruction. What gives these questions their urgency is what Johnson sees to be the continuing determination by journalistic commentators to misrepresent, to misread, or to ignore the writings by such theorists as Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man.Similarly at the heart of the problem is the determination of feminist and other politically engaged writers to assert the disabling consequences for activism that deconstructive reading promotes. The celebration of ambiguity and other forms of polysemy in contemporary literary theory, she argues, has been strangely yet persistently falsified as a denial of meaning.Beginning with two different cases of double mourning (for Paul de Man and for feminist legal theorist Mary Joe Frug), Barbara Johnson goes on to analyze the allegorical status of women in the public sphere and the uses to which Paul de Man's theories of allegory may be put in understanding today's politics of identity.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Barbara Johnson is Professor of English and Comparative Literatures at Harvard University, having previously taught at Yale. Her numerous publications include The Critical Difference (1980) and A World of Difference (1987).

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Is deconstruction dead? Was it ever alive? These are the questions discussed in Barbara Johnson's The Wake of Deconstruction. What gives these questions their urgency is what Johnson sees to be the continuing determination by journalistic commentators to misrepresent, to misread, or to ignore the writings by such theorists as Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man.

Similarly at the heart of the problem is the determination of feminist and other politically engaged writers to assert the disabling consequences for activism that deconstructive reading promotes. The celebration of ambiguity and other forms of polysemy in contemporary literary theory, she argues, has been strangely yet persistently falsified as a denial of meaning.

Beginning with two different cases of double mourning (for Paul de Man and for feminist legal theorist Mary Joe Frug), Barbara Johnson goes on to analyze the allegorical status of women in the public sphere and the uses to which Paul de Man's theories of allegory may be put in understanding today's politics of identity.

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Blackwell Publishers
• Erscheinungsdatum: 1994
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0631189637
• ISBN 13: 9780631189633
• Einband: Tapa blanda
• Anzahl der Seiten: 128
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar