Synopses & Reviews
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.
Review
"Johnson warns us early that her book is 'the record of one reader's struggles to come to grips with the problems posed by contemporary so-called deconstructive theory.' Surely, readers should not expect a straightforward explanation of a theory which celebrates 'ignorance, blindness, uncertainty, and misreading.' Those students of literary theory already familiar with the often outrageous work of Jacques Derrida will find little that is new in Johnson's ponderous theorizing. But her 'undoings' of individual texts reveal an inspired desire, well-fulfilled, to pattern skillfully the oppositions and differences within works by Barthes, Mallarme, and Melville among others." Reviewed by Daniel Weiss, Virginia Quarterly Review (Copyright 2006 Virginia Quarterly Review)
Synopsis
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