The Wake of Deconstruction

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by Barbara Johnson

Blackwell Publishers

Due/Published June 1994, 112 pages, paper

ISBN 0631189637

Is deconstruction dead? Was it ever alive? What gives these questions their urgency is what Barbara Johnson sees to be the continuing determination by journalistic commentators to misrepresent, to misread, or not to read the writings by such theorists as Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man.Similarly at the heart of the problem for her is the determination of feminist and other politically engaged writers to assert the disabling consequences for activism that deconstructive reading promotes. The celebration of ambiguity and other forms of polysemy in contemporary literary theory, she argues, has been strangely yet persistently falsified a a denial of meaning.