Mother Tongues: Sexuality, Trials, Motherhood, Translation

Barbara E. Johnson

Published by Harvard University Press 2003

Mother Tongues

Sexuality, Trials, Motherhood, Translation

Barbara E. Johnson

https://doi.org/10.4159/9780674274242

Overview
Contents

About this book

In her most personal and deeply considered book about difference, Johnson asks: Is the mother the guardian of a oneness we have never had? The relations that link mothers, bodies, words, and laws serve as the guiding puzzles as she searches for an answer.

Reviews

Mother Tongues offers a set of brilliant, interwoven readings of Baudelaire, Benjamin, and Plath, affirming once again Barbara Johnson’s reputation as the most extraordinary of contemporary theorists. In poetry and prose alike, she finds the animated working of a default address, and traces an implicit appeal to the lost maternal or, indeed, to the irrecoverable conditions of language itself. This text weaves its reader into a fine web of writing from which one wants no escape.
-- Judith Butler, author of Gender Trouble

Barbara Johnson has the most beautiful mind—subtle, fearless, funny, logical, preternaturally alert to words and their worlds. Mother Tongues encounters central figures of modern culture and the great questions of culture—why do we read, why do we write, why do we use a mother tongue? Her illuminations are vital and deep.
-- Catharine Stimpson, author of Where the Meanings Are

Mother Tongues is a work of psychological depth and poetic organization. It builds on Johnson’s oeuvre by developing new ways of conceiving language and world, most valuably through reinterpretations of Baudelaire, Benjamin, and their reception. Johnson’s turn and return to these authors, and the subtle inquiry into the ontological dimensions of language that results, should be of interest to anyone concerned about modernity and its reifications. This book is an elegant, important, and subtle addition to Johnson’s searching work, a valuable contribution to Benjamin scholarship and scholarship on modern sexuality, and an idiosyncratic and inventive work of contemporary literary theory and comparative literature.
-- Rei Terada, author of Feeling in Theory

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	ix
Acknowledgments Publicly Available Download PDF	xi
1. Correctional Facilities Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
2. L’Esthétique du Mal Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	26
3. The Task of the Translator Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	40
4. The Poet’s Mother Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	65
5. Passage Work Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	94
6. Construction Work Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	120
7. Doing Time Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	141
8. Animate Alphabets Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	153
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	189
Credits Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	200
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	201

Language: English
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Audience: Professional and scholarly;
Pages
- Main content: 224

eBook

Published: November 30, 2003
ISBN: 9780674274242