This Reader collects in a single volume some of the most influential essays written by Barbara Johnson over the course of her thirty-year career as a pioneering literary theorist and cultural critic. Johnson achieved renown early in her career, both as a brilliant student of the Yale School of literary criticism and as the translator of Jacques Derrida's Dissemination. She went on to lead the way in extending the insights of structuralism and poststructuralism into newly emerging fields now central to literary studies, fields such as gender studies, African American studies, queer theory, and law and literature. Stunning models of critical reading and writing, her essays cultivate rigorous questioning of universalizing assumptions, respect for otherness and difference, and an appreciation of ambiguity.
Along with the classic essays that established her place in literary scholarship, this Reader makes available a selection of Johnson's later essays, brilliantly lucid and politically trenchant works exploring multilingualism and translation, materiality, ethics, subjectivity, and sexuality. The Barbara Johnson Reader offers a historical guide through the metamorphoses and tumultuous debates that have defined literary study in recent decades, as viewed by one of critical theory's most astute thinkers.
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Editors’ Preface
- Personhood and Other Objects: The Figural Dispute with Philosophy by Judith Butler
- Barbara Johnson by Barbara Johnson
- Part I. Reading Theory as Literature, Literature as Theory
- 1. The Critical Difference: BartheS/BalZac
- 2. Translator’s Introduction to Dissemination (abridged)
- 3. Poetry and Syntax: What the Gypsy Knew
- 4. A Hound, a Bay Horse, and a Turtle Dove: Obscurity in Walden
- 5. Strange Fits: Poe and Wordsworth on the Nature of Poetic Language
- 6. The Frame of Reference: Poe, Lacan, Derrida
- Part II. Race, Sexuality, Gender
- 7. Euphemism, Understatement, and the Passive Voice: A Genealogy of Afro-American Poetry
- 8. Metaphor, Metonymy, and Voice in Their Eyes Were Watching God
- 9. Moses and Intertexuality: Sigmund Freud, Zora Neale Hurston, and the Bible
- 10. Lesbian Spectacles: Reading Sula, Passing, Thelma and Louise, and The Accused
- 11. Bringing Out D. A. Miller
- 12. Correctional Facilities
- 13. My Monster/My Self
- Part III. Language, Personhood, Ethics
- 14. Introduction to Freedom and Interpretation (abridged)
- 15. Muteness Envy
- 16. Apostrophe, Animation, and Abortion
- 17. Anthropomorphism in Lyric and Law
- 18. Using People: Kant with Winnicott
- 19. Ego Sum Game
- 20. Melville’s Fist: The Execution of Billy Budd
- Part IV. Pedagogy and Translation
- 21. Nothing Fails Like Success
- 22. Bad Writing
- 23. Teaching Deconstructively
- 24. Poison or Remedy? Paul de Man as Pharmakon
- 25. Taking Fidelity Philosophically
- 26. The Task of the Translator
- 27. Teaching Ignorance: L’Ecole des femmes
- Afterword: Barbara’s Signature by Shoshana Felman
- Bibliography
- Index
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