The Critical Difference

Essays in the Contemporary Rhetoric of Reading

Bibliographic Data

ID4386661
AuthorsAndrew J Mckenna
Year1981
Volume10
Issue3
Pages92
Publication date1981-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeREVIEW
Review ofThe Critical Difference: Essays in the Contemporary Rhetoric of Reading, Barbara Johnson, 1985
VenueSubStance (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0049-2426 • E-ISSN: 1527-2095
PublisherProject MUSE (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.2307/3684096
OpenAlexW2158667659
LanguageEN

Barbara Johnson investigates the significant and illuminating ways in which both literature and criticism are critically different from what they purport be. Her subtle and provocative studies of Balzac, Mallarme, Baudelaire, Apollinaire, Melville, Poe, Barthes, Lacan, Austin, and Derrida take a refreshing new approach 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 or more literary or critical works reveals the text's fundamental discrepancies, ambiguities, and contradictions. If rhetoric is seen as language's capacity 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 capture the logic of a text's own disagreement with itself

Art · Critical reading · Criticism · Epistemology · Interpretation (philosophy) · Linguistics · Literal (mathematical logic) · Literal and figurative language · Literary criticism · Literature · Meaning (existential) · Reading (process) · Rhetoric · Statement (logic) · Media, Communication, and Education · Philosophy · Poetry Analysis and Criticism · Rhetoric and Communication Studies

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