The Critical Difference: Essays in the Contemporary Rhetoric of Reading - Softcover

Johnson, Prof Barbara

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0801827280 ISBN 13: 9780801827280

Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985

Synopsis

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 this title

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)

About this edition

• Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
• Publication date: 1985
• ISBN 10: 0801827280
• ISBN 13: 9780801827280
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 168