The Rhetoric of Affirmative Resistance

Dissonant Identities from Carroll to Derrida

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by Julian Wolfreys

Palgrave

Due/Published July 1997, 220 pages, paper

ISBN 0312173318

Wolfreys offers close readings of films, novels, and poetry in order to draw attention to the ways in which texts appear to resist acts of reading by seemingly performing their own idiomatic, resistant, and wayward identites. He proposes a new understanding of dissonant identity through theoretically informed, yet unpredictable acts of interpretation that draw on texts by Derrida, Deleuze, Levinas, Heidegger, and others. Looking at the construction of identity in Lewis Carroll's Alice books, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, James Joyce, the avant-garde film work of Maya Deren, French novelist and philosopher Sylvie Germain, Derrida, Michel Deguy, and George Eliot, Wolfreys asks the reader to reassess textual performances through a theoretically informed analysis of a radical rhetoric of indentity that is simultaneously both resistant to mastery and affirmative of dissonance.