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The Critical Difference: Essays in the Contemporary Rhetoric of Reading
Contributor(s): Johnson, Barbara (Author)
ISBN: 0801827280     ISBN-13: 9780801827280
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
OUR PRICE:   $27.55  
Product Type: Paperback
Published: March 1985
Qty:
Annotation: In seven essays, Johnson investigates the significant and illuminating ways in which both literature and criticism are "critically different" from what they purport to be. (Criticism)
Additional Information
BISAC Categories:
- Literary Criticism | Semiotics & Theory
- Language Arts & Disciplines | Rhetoric
Dewey: 801.95
LCCN: 80021533
Physical Information: 0.4" H x 5.79" W x 8.89" (0.56 lbs) 168 pages
 
Descriptions, Reviews, Etc.
Publisher Description:
Barbara Johnson investigates the significant and illuminating ways in which both literature and criticism are "critically different" from what they purport to be. Her subtle and provocative studies of Balzac, Mallarme, Baudelaire, Apollinaire, Melville, Poe, Barthes, Lacan, Austin, and Derrida take a refreshing new approach to the fundamental questions of meaning, interpretation, and the relationship between literature and criticism.

In each of seven essays, a clear, precise, and detailed reading of the rhetoric of one or more literary or critical works reveals the text's fundamental discrepancies, ambiguities, and contradictions. If rhetoric is seen as language's capacity to differ from literal statement, and if "to differ" can also mean "to disagree, " then the reading of the rhetoric of literature and theory here is an attempt to capture the logic of a text's own disagreement with itself.