The Critical Difference: Essays in the Contemporary Rhetoric of Reading (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780801827280)

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.

Author: Barbara Johnson
ISBN-10: 0801827280
ISBN-13: 9780801827280
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
Language: English
Published: 03/19/1985
Pages: 168
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.56lbs
Size: 8.89h x 5.79w x 0.40d