Signature Pieces: On the Institution of Authorship

Kamuf, Peggy

doi:10.1353/book.57995

Signature Pieces: On the Institution of Authorship

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Signature Pieces: On the Institution of Authorship
Book
Peggy Kamuf
2018
Published by: Cornell University Press
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

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Some contemporary approaches to literature still accept the separation of historical, biographical, external concerns from formal, internal ones. On the borderline that lends this division between inside and outside its apparent coherence is signature. In Peggy Kamuf’s view, studying signature will help us to rediscover some of the stakes of literary writing beyond the historicist/formalist opposition. Drawing on Derrida’s extensive work on signatures and proper names, Kamuf investigates authorial signature in key writers from Rousseau to Woolf, as well as the implications of signature for the institutions of authorship and criticism.