The Rhetoric of Affirmative Resistance: Dissonant Identities from Carroll to Derrida

In this wide-ranging, challenging theoretical study, Julian Wolfreys offers close readings of films, novels and poetry in order to draw attention to the ways in which texts resist acts of reading by performing their own idiomatic, wayward identities. Looking at the construction of identity in Lewis Carroll, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, James Joyce, Maya Deren, Sylvie Germain, Jacques Derrida, Michel Deguy, and George Eliot, Wolfreys asks the reader to reassess the textual performance of identity by attending to a rhetoric which is simultaneously both resistant to mastery and affirmative of dissonance.

Julian Wolfreys

St.Martin's Press

PALGRAVE~MACMILLAN

In this introduction to the work of Jacques Derrida, Julian Wolfreys challenges the notion that what Derrida does can be turned into a theory for literary interpretation. He questions the belief in a critical methodology called "deconstruction" which can be applied to literary texts in a programmatic fashion. Wolfreys introduces the reader to the range of Derrida's interests and concerns, while tendering readings informed by Derrida's thought of canonical and less well-known literary works. He works through considerations of what deconstruction might or might not be, while offering a critical appreciation of the reception of Derrida's work within the institution of literary criticism.

Deconstruction - Derrida (Transitions)

Literature & Fiction

History & Criticism

This book offers the first major critical study in English of one of Britain's most inventive and significant writers of the twentieth century. This study rigorously engages with those aspects of literary stylistics and personal and national identity so important in Ackroyd's work. Rejecting the postmodern label previously attached to the author, Jeremy Gibson and Julian Wolfreys provide a consideration of all Ackroyd's writing to date, from his poetry and critical thought, to his novels and biographies, offering an indispensable account to anyone interested in Ackroyd and the condition of the novel at the end of the twentieth century.

Peter Ackroyd: The Ludic and Labyrinthine Text

Jeremy Gibson

The J. Hillis Miller Reader

This anthology exhibits the diversity, inventiveness, and intellectual energy of the writings of J. Hillis Miller, the most significant North American literary critic of the twentieth century. From the 1950s onward, Miller has made invaluable contributions to our understanding of the practice and theory of literary criticism, the ethics and responsibilities of teaching and reading, and the role of literature in the modern world. He has also shown successive generations of scholars and students the necessity of comprehending the relationship between philosophy and literature. Divided into six sections, the volume provides more than twenty significant extracts from Miller’s works. In addition, there is a new interview with Miller, as well as a series of specially commissioned critical responses to Miller’s work by a number of the leading figures in literary and cultural studies today. Following a comprehensive critical introduction by the editor, each section has a brief introduction, directing the reader toward pertinent themes. There is also a comprehensive bibliography and a chronology of Miller’s professional life and activities. This reader, the first of Miller's work in English, provides an indispensable overview and introduction to one of the most original critical voices to have emerged since the inception of the teaching of English and American literature in universities in the English-speaking world.

Reference

Stanford University Press

Deconstruction Derrida

Palgr Mac

Dickens to Hardy 1837-1884

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Books by Julian Wolfreys