About the Book
What is the importance of deconstruction, and the writing of Jacques Derrida in particular, for literary criticism today? Derek Attridge argues that the challenge of Derrida's work for our understanding of literature and its value has still not been fully met, and in this book, which traces a close engagement with Derrida's writing over two decades and reflects an interest in that work going back a further two decades, shows how that work can illuminate a variety of topics. Chapters include an overview of deconstruction as a critical practice today, discussions of the secret, postcolonialism, ethics, literary criticism, jargon, fiction, and photography, and responses to the theoretical writing of Emmanuel Levinas, Roland Barthes, and J. Hillis Miller. Also included is a discussion of the recent reading of Derrida's philosophy as 'radical atheism', and the book ends with a conversation on deconstruction and place with the theorist and critic Jean-Michel Rabate. Running throughout is a concern with the question of responsibility, as exemplified in Derrida's own readings of literary and philosophical texts: responsibility to the work being read, responsibility to the protocols of rational argument, and responsibility to the reader.
Table of Contents:
Introduction; 1. Deconstruction Today; 2. Singularities, Responsibilities: Derrida, Deconstruction, and Literary Criticism; 3. Following Derrida; 4. The Impossibility of Ethics; 5. Arche-Jargon; 6. Deconstruction and Fiction; 7. Posthumous Infidelity: Derrida, Levinas and the Third; 8. Roland Barthes's Obtuse, Sharp Meaning and the Responsibilities of Commentary; 9. Nothing to Declare: J. Hillis Miller and Zero's Paradox; 10. The Place of Deconstruction: a dialogue with Jean-Michel Rabaté; 11. Coetzee's Artists, Coetzee's Art.
About the Author :
Derek Attridge is Emeritus Professor in the Department of English and Related Literature at the University of York and Fellow of the British Academy. He is the author or editor of thirty books across a number of fields, including literary theory, South African literature, the history and forms of poetry and the work of James Joyce. His most recent publications are, as author, The Experience of Poetry: From Homer’s Listeners to Shakespeare’s Readers (2019) and The Work of Literature (2015) and, as co-editor, In a Province: Studies in the Writing of South Africa by Graham Pechey (2022), Literature and Event: Twenty-First Century Reformulations (2021) and The Work of Reading: Literary Criticism in the 21st Century (2021). He was the first recipient of the Robert Fitzgerald Prosody Prize and his book The Singularity of Literature won the European Society for the Study of English Prize for literary studies in 2006. He has held a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Leverhulme Research Professorship and fellowships at the Camargo Foundation, the Bogliasco Foundation, the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study, the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies, the National Humanities Centre and All Souls and St Catherine’s Colleges, Oxford. Before moving to York, he held posts at the universities of Oxford, Southampton, Strathclyde and at Rutgers University, New Jersey. Temporary positions have included Visiting Professorships in the USA, Italy, France, South Africa and Egypt.
Review :
This wonderful book admirably displays Derek Attridge's special gifts as a reader: clarity, learning, and penetrating understanding. It contains some of the best essays ever written about what is distinctive in Derrida's thinking.
Over the past forty years, Derek Attridge has engaged, quite possibly more meticulously than anyone else, with the work and thought of Jacques Derrida. In this book, he presents us with many of the richest fruits of that work of love. Through his abiding care for the working of language, he reminds us just how exacting, how adventurous, how serious and how deeply responsive Derrida could be to the words and potential meanings of others.
This wonderful book admirably displays Derek Attridge's special gifts as a reader: clarity, learning, and penetrating understanding. It contains some of the best essays ever written about what is distinctive in Derrida's thinking.
Over the past forty years, Derek Attridge has engaged, quite possibly more meticulously than anyone else, the work and thought of Jacques Derrida. In this book, he presents us with many of the richest fruits of that work of love. Through his abiding care for the working of language, he reminds us just how exacting, how adventurous, how serious and how deeply responsive Derrida could be to the words and potential meanings of others. That generosity, that hospitality, is something that Attridge himself now advances; and, by bringing Derrida into an encounter with thinkers and writers from the Renaissance to the contemporary world, he is able to make us feel the power and importance – the profound responsibility – of an attending to the words of others: it is, and becomes here, a matter of life and death, be it the life and death faced by Abraham and Isaac, the life and death of Derrida himself and of his friends, such as Levinas, or the life and death of cats at the mercy of humans. The stakes are always high; the writing always lucid; the demands of literature always exigent – and this is what Attridge knows, and allows us to feel. In these crude and barbaric times, we are fortunate to be made aware, once again, of the importance of responsibility in our human encounters with others, with the world.
