The Critical Difference

Essays in the Contemporary Rhetoric of Reading
Erscheinungsjahr 1985
ISBN: 978-0-8018-2728-0
Verlag: Johns Hopkins University Press

Buch, Englisch, 168 Seiten, Format (B × H): 152 mm x 229 mm, Gewicht: 259 g

Barbara Johnson investigates the significant and illuminating ways in which both literature and criticism ate "critically different" from what they purport to be. Her subtle and provocative studies of Balzac, Mallarme, Baudelaire, Apollinaire, Melville, Poe, Bathes, 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 of more literary or critical works reveals the text's fundamental discrepancies, ambuquities, 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.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Johnson, Barbara

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Sprachwissenschaft Sprechwissenschaft, Rhetorik
• Geisteswissenschaften Sprachwissenschaft Sprachwissenschaften Semiotik

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Opening Remarks
Part I. Sexuality and Difference
Chapter 1. The Critical Difference: BartheS/BalZac
Chapter 2. Allegory's Trip-Tease: The White Waterlily
Part II. Poetry and Difference
Chapter 3. Poetry and Its Double: Two invitations au voyage
Chapter 4. Poetry and Performative Language: Mallarme and Austin
Chapter 5. Poetry and Syntax: What the Gypsy Knew
Part III. Difference in the Act
Chapter 6. Melville's Fist: The Execution of Billy Budd
Chapter 7. The Frame of Reference: Poe, Lacan, Derrida
Notes
Index

Über Autor(innen)

Johnson, Barbara
Barbara Johnson is professor of French and comparative literature at Harvard University. She is author of Défigurations du langage poétique and translator of Jacques Derrida's La Dissémination.