The Derrida Reader draws together a number of Derrida’s most interesting and idiosyncratic essays that treat literary language, the idea of the literary, and questions of poetics and poetry. The essays discuss single tropes or concepts, a figure such as metaphor, the ideas of titles and signatures, proper names, and Derrida’s thinking on such subjects as undecidability or aporia. The editor’s introduction is a demonstration in practice of how Derrida reads and how he adapts the act of reading to the text or figure in question. The introduction also outlines each essay’s main points, its usefulness for reading literary texts, and its particular area of interest. The Derrida Reader thus provides students of literature with a focused, contextualized, and readily understandable volume.
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Book Description
In the English-speaking world, Jacques Derrida’s writings have most influenced the discipline of literary studies. Yet what has emerged since the initial phase of Derrida’s influence on the study of English literature, classed under the rubric of deconstruction, has often been disowned by Derrida. What, then, can Derrida teach us about literary language, about the rhetoric of literature, and about questions concerning style, form, and structure?
Editorial Reviews
Review
This is a good anthology and will serve well the teacher of deconstruction This is a good anthology and will serve well the teacher of deconstruction
--This text refers to the
Paperback
edition.
Language Notes
Text: English (translation)
Original Language: French
Original Language: French
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More About the Author
Jacques Derrida (1930-2004), was born in Algeria, has been called the most famous philosopher of our time. He was the author of a number of books, including Writing and Difference, which came to be seen as defining texts of postmodernist thought.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Mostly excellent reader for a subpar author,
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This review is from: The Derrida Reader: Writing Performances (Stages) (Paperback)
I hate Derrida. Violently. He's an etymological sophist and an anti-foundationalist who expressly denies the law of non-contradiction and employs proving a negative (like Heidegger) as a valid speculative technique. He generally has very little of any consequence to say - but lots to say about it. Rather unfortunately for me, given one of my fields, I often have to respond to his work or followers of it.
This review is not an attempt to review Derrida's work contained in the volume. My opinion of that should be quite clear. Rather, it's a review of the reader and the job of editing and commentary ably done by Mr. Wolfreys and how well it represents the major currents of D's work, with which I'm quite familiar. In my opinion, this is the best reader I've seen. It nicely contextualizes D's work without lots of jargon or psychobabble common to many of his expositors in the introduction (you can skip directly to p13 though, before that the editor just talks about introductions). It's an intro written by someone familiar with Heidegger (who D is heavily indebted to) and Continental philosophy, which is sadly not common knowledge among the "Deconstruction" school. The reader picks Derrida's most lucid moments and uses them to illustrate key themes of his work. It almost makes him seem sane by focusing more on the ontological and hermeneutical currents of his work than on his knack for etymological sophistry for which he became popular in America amongst the Deconstruction school. Somewhat surprisingly, that's also my major criticism. While this work ably presents the major philosophical themes of Derrida in their most cogent form (logocentrism in "Scribbles", the return to Hegel in "Spectres of Marx", etc) , it skimps a bit on where he's probably most influential - lit crit. "Structure, Sign, and Play from the Discourses in the Human Sciences", from "Writing and Difference" isn't included - which is a bit of an oversight. While this essay gives me migraines due to its abstruseness, suspension of non-contradiction and generally poor reasoning - it is his most popular one (with that whole "center is not the center" bit) and really should be in any work representative of his thought since it's more or less the foundation of the Deconstruction school of thought. On the whole, a very lucid and even-handed treatment of Derrida. Recommended as an introduction for the interested novice or as a desk reference for the scholar who deals with aspects of French Post-structuralism involving Derrida.
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