The Barbara Johnson Reader: The Surprise of Otherness

Barbara Johnson

Published by Duke University Press 2014

The Barbara Johnson Reader

The Surprise of Otherness

Barbara Johnson
Edited by: Melissa Feuerstein , Bill Johnson González , Lili Porten and Keja L. Valens

In the series A John Hope Franklin Center Book

https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822399070

Overview
Contents

About this book

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.

Author / Editor information

Barbara Johnson (1947–2009) was Professor Emerita of English and Comparative Literature and Fredric Wertham Professor Emerita of Psychiatry and Law in Society at Harvard University.

Melissa Feuerstein is a Research Associate at the Davis Center at Harvard University.

Bill Johnson González is Assistant Professor of English at DePaul University.

Lili Porten has taught in the writing programs at Harvard, Boston University, and Boston College.

Keja Valens is Associate Professor of English at Salem State University in Salem, Massachusetts.

Reviews

“Johnson’s real gift was to tackle the ‘dead white males’ of the canon and re-read them, looking for the women, ever alert to what she called ‘muteness envy’ in canonical poetry. She directed her attention to popular works, too, to films such as Thelma and Louise and The Piano, happy to bring Keats into the discussion as she did so. Such essays stress critical and creative vitality in the midst of death, and are still life-giving today, still radical, angry and passionate, yet always disciplined. Johnson asks acute questions, inserts the personal into her academic essays, and gives us new ideas about ‘how to read.’”

-- Lesley McDowell TLS

“Reading these essays, one finds them as sprightly, brilliant, and revelatory as ever. Johnson’s style—famous for the clarity that paradoxically masks and illuminates the argumentative complexity of the writing—is brisk, orderly, and economical. … Perhaps this is the moment to return to the intellectual upheaval of deconstruction, that almost forgotten art of reading and rereading. There is no better place to begin rereading than right here, with Barbara Johnson’s own startling and writerly prose.”

-- Judith Brown Modernism/modernity

“Essays on abortion, corporate personhood, and many other still contemporary issues show that, for Johnson, deconstruction was always deeply intertwined with lived political reality, and many of the best essays in the collection bridge the gap between readings of poems and analysis of life in various forms of political relation, often in the context of the surprising strangeness of the textual or human encounter. For Johnson, ‘the undecidable is the political. There is politics precisely because there is undecidability. And there is also poetry’ (p.227). The forms of her own essays, intriguing in the turns they take, the conclusions they draw, and the interpretations they bring forth from the texts they examine, highlight and perform this causal relationship in consistently insightful and surprising ways.”

-- Forum for Modern Language Studies

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	v
Acknowledgments Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Editors’ Preface Publicly Available Download PDF	xi
Personhood and Other Objects The Figural Dispute with Philosophy Judith Butler Publicly Available Download PDF	xvii
Barbara Johnson Barbara Johnson Publicly Available Download PDF	xxvii
Part I. Reading Theory as Literature, Literature as Theory
Chapter 1. The Critical Difference BartheS/BalZac Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	3
Chapter 2. Translator’s Introduction to Dissemination (abridged) Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	14
Chapter 3. Poetry and Syntax What the Gypsy Knew Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	26
Chapter 4. A Hound, a Bay Horse, and a Turtle Dove Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	36
Chapter 5. Strange Fits Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	44
Chapter 6. The Frame of Reference Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	57
Part II. Race, Sexuality, Gender
Chapter 7. Euphemism, Understatement, and the Passive Voice A Genealogy of Afro- American Poetry Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	101
Chapter 8. Metaphor, Metonymy, and Voice in Their Eyes Were Watching God Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	108
Chapter 9. Moses and Intertextuality Sigmund Freud, Zora Neale Hurston, and the Bible Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	126
Chapter 10. Lesbian Spectacles Reading Sula, Passing, Thelma and Louise, and The Accused Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	141
Chapter 11. Bringing Out D. A. Miller Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	147
Chapter 12. Correctional Facilities Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	155
Chapter 13. My Monster/My Self Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	179
Part III. Language, Personhood, Ethics
Chapter 14. Introduction to Freedom and Interpretation (abridged) Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	193
Chapter 15. Muteness Envy Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	200
Chapter 16. Apostrophe, Animation, and Abortion Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	217
Chapter 17. Anthropomorphism in Lyric and Law Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	235
Chapter 18. Using People Kant with Winnicott Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	262
Chapter 19. Ego Sum Game Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	275
Chapter 20. Melville’s Fist The Execution of Billy Budd Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	289
Part IV. Pedagogy and Translation
Chapter 21. Nothing Fails Like Success Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	327
Chapter 22. Bad Writing Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	334
Chapter 23. Teaching Deconstructively Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	347
Chapter 24. Poison or Remedy? Paul de Man as Pharmakon Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	357
Chapter 25. Taking Fidelity Philosophically Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	371
Chapter 26. The Task of the Translator Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	377
Chapter 27. Teaching Ignorance L’Ecole des femmes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	401
Afterword Barbara’s Signature Shoshana Felman Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	421
Bibliography Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	433
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	437

Language: English
Publisher: Duke University Press
Audience: Professional and scholarly;
Pages
- Main content: 481

eBook

Published: July 31, 2014
ISBN: 9780822399070