Critical Encounters

by Caruth, Cathy; Esch, Deborah

• ISBN13: 9780813520865
• ISBN10: 081352086X
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1995-02-01
• Publisher: Rutgers Univ Pr

Summary

Critical Encounters addresses a central and long-standing concern in literary criticism and theory: What is the relation between literature and reality, or language and experience? The questions raised by poststructuralist criticism, and particularly deconstruction, concerning the establishment of reference, appear to many readers to involve a dangerous denial of any link between texts and reality: the possibility that reference is indirect seems to mean that we have no reliable access to experience or to history and, therefore, no basis for political action or ethical decision. Drawing on contemporary theories of literature, history, and feminism, the essays in this volume interrogate the assumptions underlying this critique of deconstruction by asking what it would mean to conceive of an experience that is constituted by the very way it escapes or resists comprehension. Taking as their starting point the attempt to rethink fundamental questions of reality and reference, the contributors ultimately ask how we might learn to recognize and to respond to the realities of a history, a politics, and an ethics not based on straightforward understanding.

Table of Contents

Prefatory Note	vii
Introduction: The Insistence of Reference	1	(10)
Cathy Caruth
Reference, Materiality, and History
Ending Up/Taking Back (with Two Postscripts on Paul de Man's Historical Materialism)	11	(31)
Andrzej Warminski
Literary Theory as the Criticism of Aesthetics: De Man, Blanchot, and Romantic ``Allegories of Cognition''	42	(50)
Cynthia Chase
The Claims of Refrence	92	(14)
Cathy Caruth
Singularities, Responsibilities: Derrida, Deconstruction, and Literary Criticism	106	(21)
Derek Attridge
Hallucinatory History: Hugo's Revolution	127	(28)
E. S. Burt
Nietzsche, Deconstruction, and the Truth of History	155	(29)
Kevin Newmark
The Work to Come	184	(29)
Deborah Esch
Rethinking Responsibility: Politics and Ethics
Contingent Foundations: Feminism and the Question of ``Postmodernism''	213	(20)
Judith Butler
Inside/Out	233	(8)
Diana Fuss
``I Say I Am There'': Siting/Citing the Subject of Feminism and Deconstruction	241	(21)
Harriet Davidson
Deconstruction and the Impossibility of Justice	262	(13)
Thomas Keenan
Visage, Figure: Speech and Murder in Levinas's Totality and Infinity	275	(24)
Jill Robbins
Notes on Contributors	299	(2)
Index	301