The Barbara Johnson reader : the surprise of otherness
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
The Barbara Johnson reader : the surprise of otherness
（A John Hope Franklin Center book）
Duke University Press, 2014
- : pbk
- : hardback
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Note
Bibliography: p. [433]-436
Includes index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
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.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments vii Editors' Preface xi Personhood and Other Objects: The Figural Dispute with Philosophy / Judith Butler xvii Barbara Johnson by Barbara Johnson xxvii Part I. Reading Theory as Literature, Literature as Theory 1. The Critical Difference: BartheS/BalZac 3 2. Translator's Introduction to Dissemination (abridged) 14 3. Poetry and Syntax: What the Gypsy Knew 26 4. A Hound, a Bay Horse, and a Turtle Dove: Obscurity in Walden 36 5. Strange Fits: Poe and Wordsworth on the Nature of Poetic Language 44 6. The Frame of Reference: Poe, Lacan, Derrida 57 Part II. Race, Sexuality, Gender 7. Euphemism, Understatement, and the Passive Voice: A Geneaology of Afro-American Poetry 101 8. Metaphor, Metonymy, and Voice in Their Eyes Were Watching God 108 9. Moses and Intertextuality: Sigmund Freud, Zora Neale Hurston, and the Bible 126 10. Lesbian Spectacles: Reading Sula,
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