Hawthorne & History: Defacing It (Bucknell Lectures in Literary Theory)

The author shows, through a close reading of Hawthorne's "The Minister's Black Veil", how a text can offer unsolicited answers and reveal its linguistic ruses to close scrutiny and how such a reading can bear on contemporary debates about canon formation, the university curriculum and the place of literary studies in the late 20th century. The book includes an interview with the author, an increasingly prominent figure in American critical theory.