Occasional Deconstructions

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Occasional Deconstructions

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Julian Wolfreys - Author

Price: $81.50
Hardcover - 382 pages

Release Date: October 2004

ISBN10: 0-7914-6225-0
ISBN13: 978-0-7914-6225-6

Price: $33.95
Paperback - 382 pages

Release Date: October 2004

ISBN10: 0-7914-6226-9
ISBN13: 978-0-7914-6226-3

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Summary

Argues that deconstruction is not a critical methodology or theory but that which makes any act of good reading possible.

In Occasional Deconstructions, Julian Wolfreys challenges the notion that deconstruction is a critical methodology, offering instead a number of reintroductions or reorientations to the texts of Jacques Derrida and the idea or possibility of deconstructions. Proceeding from specific readings of various texts (both film and literary), as well as mobilizing a number of issues from Derrida's recent work surrounding questions of ethics, politics, and identity, Wolfreys considers the role of deconstruction in broader academic and institutional contexts, and questions whether, in fact, deconstruction can be called upon to function as theory at all.

In this book, Wolfreys suggests that the patient, necessary work of reading, in which response and responsibility to the other has a chance to manifest itself, is necessary to the always political and ethical tracing of the material and the historical. He also contends that reading should be an encounter that gives place to an acknowledgment of the other, and that this singular act by which one is introduced to the other can never be programmed.

"This volume forcefully explodes preexisting notions and biases about deconstruction and very usefully serves as a catalyst for the growing debate about the value of critical theory in the interdisciplinary world of contemporary literary and cultural studies." — Kenneth Womack, coeditor of Mapping the Ethical Turn: A Reader in Ethics, Culture, and Literary Theory

Julian Wolfreys is Professor of Victorian Studies at the University of Florida. He is the author of many books, including Being English: Narratives, Idioms, and Performances of National Identity from Coleridge to Trollope, and is the coeditor (with John Brannigan and Ruth Robbins) of The French Connections of Jacques Derrida, both also published by SUNY Press.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction

PART ONE: FALSE STARTS

1. Reflecting on the Occasions of Introduction: Justifying the Unjustifiable or, Beginning Again

PART TWO: IDENTITIES IN RUINS

2. Uncanny Temporalities, Haunting Occasions: Sunset Boulevard
3. Biography's Ruins: The Afterlife of Mary Shelley
4. Between: Speculations

PART THREE: APPARITIONING

5. Eternity and a Day or, an "Endless Foreword": Tout dire
6. Citation’s Haunt: Spectres of Derrida
7. Occasions of Trauma and Testimony: Witnessing, Memory, and Responsibility

PART FOUR: AFFIRMATIVE RESISTANCES

8. Origins of Deconstruction? Deconstruction, that which arrives (if it arrives at all)
9. Hauntology or the Political? (or, No Politics, Not Now): Always Already Deceived
10. Letter to Martin McQuillan, Concerning "the New International": The Indelible Marx of Haunting

PART FIVE: READING TO COME

11. Guilty Reading

Notes

Works Cited

Index of Proper Names

Related Subjects

Cultural Studies
Literary Theory
Philosophy of Literature

43003/43004(JP/KW/SP)

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