Deconstructions: A User's Guide [Paperback]

Nicholas Royle (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 25, 2000

Deconstructions is a user's guide to deconstruction across a range of topics and discourses. Chapter topics range from the obvious (feminism, post-colonialism, and technology) to the less so (drugs, film, weaving). Yet each of the essays has more than one focus, exploring or opening on to further and other deconstructions. The book has been put together to demonstrate the multiple and altering contexts in which deconstructive thinking and practice are at work, both within and beyond the academy, both within and beyond what is called "the West." Nicholas Royle has commissioned new essays by some of the most distinguished contemporary thinkers, including Geoffrey Bennington, Diane Elam, J. Hillis Miller, and Jacques Derrida.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Nicholas Royle is Professor of English at the University of Sussex.

Product Details

• Paperback: 328 pages
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan (November 25, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0333717619
• ISBN-13: 978-0333717615
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.2 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,958,150 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars So you want to know about Deconstruction...?, August 26, 2001

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"lsteveny" (Manhattan) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Deconstructions: A User's Guide (Paperback)

If you've always wondered what the hell "Deconstruction" is supposed to be about, look no further. Before you get too excited, I'm not going to claim that this is the best book on Derrida's work or necessarily even for every neophyte--it's not exactly a primer. However, Royle's collection sidesteps the problem that so many other books fall prey to by trying to explain deconstruction, instead these authors show deconstruction at work. The editor's intro--cleverly disguised as a complaint letter to a dictionary's head editor--amusingly and clearly explains what deconstruction is not, untangling many (frankly vulgar) confusions and reductions that have grown up around the term in the last twenty-odd years (e.g. Deconstruction is not a technique, strategy, or method. It is not "destruction."). The essays proper pair deconstruction with some expected terms: feminism, poetry, psychoanalysis (revealing in this last example some of the debt Derrida owes Freud while acknowledging his intellectual rivalry with Lacan)--to the surprising: drugs, love, weaving (weaving?). These authors show how deconstruction, from a Derridean rather than a Yale-ian perspective, "happens." It isn't applied, its effects are articulated; and the deconstructions that are part and parcel of texts and the way they mean, when articulated, have effects, create changes in the ways the texts, and discourses (for example on drugs) mean. If that last sentence didn't make sense to you, read a few of these gems and, I promise, it will become more meaningful.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An excellent way into deconstruction, August 8, 2002

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A critical reader - See all my reviews

This review is from: Deconstructions: A User's Guide (Hardcover)

This collection of articles by top-flight critics introduces deconstructive thinking in a wide range of fields or connections (deconstruction and politics, deconstruction and feminism, deconstruction and psychoanalysis, etc.) It is a very fine book and a paperback edition ought to be made available so that people could afford to buy it.