The Wake of Deconstruction
Barbara Johnson(Author)
Blackwell Publishers
Published on 5. June 1994
Book
Paperback/Softback
128 pages
978-0-631-18963-3 (ISBN)
Description
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.
More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
Oxford
United Kingdom
Publishing group
John Wiley and Sons Ltd
Target group
College/higher education
Professional and scholarly
Product notice
Paperback (UK-trade)
Dimensions
Height: 140 mm
Width: 216 mm
Weight
191 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-631-18963-3 (9780631189633)
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Schweitzer Classification
Content
Preface. Introduction: Michael Payne and Harold Schweizer. Double Mourning and the Public Sphere. Women and Allegory. Interview with Barbara Johnson. Barbara Johnson: A Bibliography (1973-1993). Index.