The essays in this collection address a diverse range of themes in the work of Jacques Derrida, including Irish identity, communication, ethics, love, tele-technology, Victorian studies, the limits of philosophy, translation, otherness and literature.

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Product Description: 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...read more

Product Description: 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...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Continuum's Guides for the Perplexed are clear, concise and accessible introductions to thinkers, writers and subjects that students and readers can find especially challenging. Concentrating specifically on what it is that makes the subject difficult to grasp, these books explain and explore key themes and ideas, guiding the reader towards a thorough understanding of demanding material. Jacques Derrida is one of the most important thinkers of the twentieth century. His writings, his lectures and his involvement in a number of political causes have transformed the way in which literature and cultural studies is taught yet his work is often met with incomprehension, hostility and fear. This guide provides students with a clear, unintimidating introduction to Derrida, the key concepts and ideas associated with his work and the major subjects he addresses. Without assuming any prior knowledge of Derrida's work or literary theory, the guide introduces Derrida's ideas, work, reception and his wider philosophical and critical influence. Throughout, Wolfreys refers to literature and film examples, grounding discussion of theoretical concepts in close reading of specific texts.

In the English-speaking world, Jacques Derrida’s writings have most influenced the discipline of literary studies. Yet what has emerged since the initial phase of Derrida’s influence on the study of English literature, classed under the rubric of deconstruction, has often been disowned by Derrida. What, then, can Derrida teach us about literary language, about the rhetoric of literature, and about questions concerning style, form, and structure? The Derrida Reader draws together a number of Derrida’s most interesting and idiosyncratic essays that treat literary language, the idea of the literary, and questions of poetics and poetry. The essays discuss single tropes or concepts, a figure such as metaphor, the ideas of titles and signatures, proper names, and Derrida’s thinking on such subjects as undecidability or aporia. The editor’s introduction is a demonstration in practice of how Derrida reads and how he adapts the act of reading to the text or figure in question. The introduction also outlines each essay’s main points, its usefulness for reading literary texts, and its particular area of interest. The Derrida Reader thus provides students of literature with a focused, contextualized, and readily understandable volume. (view table of contents)

This authoritative survey examines how the Victorian middle-classes perceived themselves, through analyses of the literature of the period. Asking how the middle classes distinguished themselves from their forbears, Julian Wolfreys reads in detail major novels by:- Charles Dickens- Elizabeth Gaskell- Wilkie Collins- George Eliot - Thomas Hardy.Wolfreys explores the novelists' constructions of modernity, national identity and their understanding of 'becoming historical' in distinction from that of previous generations. He offers illuminating close readings of texts and examines narratives set in a recent past in order to investigate the role of cultural memory in the making of identity. Also featuring a helpful Chronology and an Annotated Bibliography to aid further study, this stimulating guide encourages readers to reassess the work of key writers of the nineteenth century.

Product Description: This is a collection of poetry and essays by the enormously gifted writer, musician and academic Professor Julian Wolfreys. Accompanied by numerous photographs and paintings, the book takes us on a journey through: our sense of place - grief and trauma - memory and recollection - memory and narrative - chance, coincidence and meaning - love - the sense of mood and feeling - absence - language - reading - allegory - imagination - and much more...read more

Product Description: A guide to the history and development of modern criticism in the humanities. The work takes the reader through introductions to historically influential philosophers, literary critics, schools of thought and movements from Spinoza and Descartes to phenomenology and Heidegger, before turning to its three principal areas or critical attention: Europe, North America and Great Britain...read more

The French Connections of Jacques Derrida offers stimulating and accessible essays that address, for the first time, the issue of Derrida's relation to French poetics, writing, thought, and culture. In addition to offering considerations of Derrida through studies of such significant French authors as Mallarme, Baudelaire, Valery, Laporte, Ponge, Perec, Blanchot, and Barthes, the book also reassesses the development of Derrida's work in the context of structuralism, biology, and linguistics in the 1960s, and looks at the possible relationships between Derrida's writing and that of the Surrealist and Oulipa groups. Derrida is introduced as one whose work is as much poetic as it is philosophical, and who is strikingly French and yet not unproblematically so. (view table of contents)

Product Description: First published in 2004. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Product Description: Introducing Criticism at the 21st Century provides a wide ranging guide to current directions in literary criticism. Each of the authors explains the various contours of their discourses while bringing these into sharp relief for the student reader through readings of canonical novels, poems, plays, films, and Web sites...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Provides a wide-ranging guide to current directions in literary criticism This new and revised edition provides 14 chapters introducing new modes of 'hybrid' criticism which have emerged in the twenty-first century.The chapters provide thought-provoking overviews of critical thinking at the cutting edge...read more

Product Description: Introducing Literary Theories is an ideal introduction for those coming to literary theory for the first time. It provides an accessible introduction to the major theoretical approaches in chapters covering: Bakhtinian Criticism, Structuralism, Feminist Theory, Marxist Literary Theories, Reader-Response Theories, Psychoanalytic Criticism, Deconstruction, Poststructuralism, New Historicism, Cultural Materialism, Postcolonial Theory, Gay Studies/ Queer Theories, Cultural Studies and Postmodernism...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

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.

Product Description: Every student of literature needs to understand how to use literary theory to analyze and interpret the text. In Literary Theories William Baker and Julian Wolfreys challenge the outdated notion that theory is something separable from the act of reading itself...read more

Product Description: Literary Theories is the first reader and introductory guide in one volume. Divided into 12 sections covering structuralism, feminism, marxism, reader-response theory, psychoanalysis, deconstruction, post-structuralism, postmodernism, new historicism, postcolonialism, gay studies and queer theory, and cultural studies, Literary Theories introduces the reader to the most challenging and engaging aspects of critical studies in the humanities today...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Jacques Derrida has argued about the difference between literature and theory that despite its institutional status, part of its ‘institution' is the right of literature to say anything. Literature cannot be defined as such, and as soon as one seeks to produce a reading of the literary, complications arise...read more