Get Free Shipping on orders over $79
The Critical Difference : Essays in the Contemporary Rhetoric of Reading - Barbara Johnson

The Critical Difference

Essays in the Contemporary Rhetoric of Reading

By: Barbara Johnson

Paperback | 14 May 1985

At a Glance

Paperback


RRP $62.99

$61.75

or 4 interest-free payments of $15.44 with

 or 

Ships in 5 to 7 business days

Barbara Johnson investigates the significant and illuminating ways in which both literature and criticism ate "critically different" from what they purport to be. Her subtle and provocative studies of Balzac, Mallarme, Baudelaire, Apollinaire, Melville, Poe, Bathes, 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 of more literary or critical works reveals the text's fundamental discrepancies, ambuquities, 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.

Industry Reviews

""When it is done well, deconstructive criticism can be a pleasure to read, as it is in the case of Barbara Johnson. Her discussions of the reading process... are patient, ingenious, and persuasive.""

More in Literary Theory

Create Dangerously : Penguin Modern - Albert Camus
Middlemarch : Collins Classics - George Eliot
Pride and Prejudice : A Novel in Three Parts - Jane Austen

RRP $295.00

$214.75

27%
OFF
Thought as Experience in Bataille, Cioran, and Rosset - Joseph Acquisto
Literacies : 2nd edition - Mary Kalantzis

RRP $145.95

$117.75

19%
OFF
In Love with Love : The Persistence and Joy of Romantic Fiction - Ella Risbridger
Metaphors We Live By - George Lakoff

$34.99

Camera Lucida : Vintage Classics - Roland Barthes

RRP $26.99

$15.75

42%
OFF
How to Read a Book : A Touchstone book - Charles Van Doren

RRP $34.99

$18.99

46%
OFF
Poetics : Penguin Classics - Aristotle

RRP $26.99

$20.75

23%
OFF
Literary Theory : An Introduction - Terry Eagleton

RRP $38.95

$31.75

18%
OFF
Recognising the Stranger : On Palestine and Narrative - Isabella Hammad