Tempe, Arizona, United States of America
  •  10
    Deconstruction and the Yale School: An Interview with J. Hillis Miller
    with Ning Yizhong
    Derrida Today 16 (2): 170-184. 2023.
    J. Hillis Miller (1928–2021) was one of the most prominent figures in literary criticism and theory. After receiving his Ph.D. from Harvard University, he taught at Johns Hopkins University, Yale University and the University of California at Irvine. He retired as Professor Emeritus in 2002. Miller was president of the Modern Language Association of America in 1986 and contributed significantly to professional academic institutions and organizations throughout his career. As an important represe…Read more
  •  5
    Fusion Approach: Theory, Contestation, Limits (edited book)
    with Vikram Chandra, Gayatri Chakravorty, Ben Baer, Homi Bhabha, Grant Farred, Paul Jahshan, Bill Ashcroft, Stephen Morton, Dorota Kolodziejczyk, Adam Muller, Claire Chambers, James M. Ivory, David Lorne Macdonald, Sangeeta Ray, Pushpa N. Parekh, Maria Sofia Pimentel Biscaia, David Mesher, Cara Cilano, Dora Sales Salvador, Ryan Mowat, Joanne Trevenna, Amy Lee, and Sumana Roy
    Upa. 2006.
    fusion theory challenges efforts to see theory as inhibiting by presenting an approach that is innovative, eclectic, and subtle in order to draw out competing and constellating ideas and opinions. This collected volume of essays examines fusion theory and demonstrates how the theory can be applied to the reading of various works of Indian English novelists
  •  40
    Theory’s Empire: Reflections on a Vocation for Critical Inquiry
    with Stanley Fish, Peter Galison, Sander L. Gilman, Miriam Hansen, Harry Harootunian, Fredric Jameson, Jerome McGann, Robert Morgan, and Robert Pippin
    Critical Inquiry 30 (2): 396. 2004.
  •  7
    Warning the demos: political communication with a democratic audience in Demosthenes
    History of Political Thought 23 (3): 401-417. 2002.
    This paper examines rhetorical strategies used by the democratic fourth century BCE orator Demosthenes to contain and counteract aristocratic and oligarchic criticisms of democracy. Demosthenes specifically addresses six categories of complaints: procrastination, the reactive character of the democracy, factionalism, the physical threat posed by the democracy to politicians, excessive concern with private interests and finally the inability to opt for difficult but necessary actions. For each of…Read more
  •  97
    Ariadne's Thread: Repetition and the Narrative Line
    Critical Inquiry 3 (1): 57-77. 1976.
    The story of Ariadne has, as is the way with myths, its slightly asymmetrical echoes along both the narrative lines which converge in her marriage to Dionysus. Daedalus it was who told Ariadne how to save Theseus with the thread. Imprisoned by Minos in his own labyrinth, he escapes by flight, survives the fall of Icarus, and reaches Sicily safely. Daedalus is then discovered by Minos when he solves the puzzle posed publicly by Minos, with the offer of a reward to the solver: How to run a thread …Read more
  •  4
    Traditional Chinese philosophy, if engaged at all, is often regarded as an object of antiquated curiosity and dismissed as unimportant in the current age of globalization. Written by a team of internationally renowned scholars, this book, however, challenges this judgement and offers an in-depth study of pre-modern Chinese philosophy from an interdisciplinary perspective. Exploring the relevance of traditional Chinese philosophy for the global age, it takes a comparative approach, analysing anci…Read more
  •  271
    Authenticity in Painting: Remarks on Michael Fried’s Art History
    with Michael Fried, Robert Pippin, Michel Chaouli, Stefan Andriopoulos, Richard Menke, Carlo Ginzburg, Dragan Kujundzic, and Jacques Derrida
    Critical Inquiry 31 (3): 575. 2005.
    My topic is authenticity in or perhaps as painting, not the authenticity of paintings; I know next to nothing about the problem of verifying claims of authorship. I am interested in another kind of genuineness and fraudulence, the kind at issue when we say of a person that he or she is false, not genuine, inauthentic, lacks integrity, and, especially when we say he or she is playing to the crowd, playing for effect, or is a poseur. These are not quite moral distinctions (no one has a duty to be a…Read more
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  •  100
    The Critic as Host
    Critical Inquiry 3 (3): 439-447. 1977.
    At one point in "Rationality and Imagination in Cultural History" M.H. Abrams cites Wayne Booth's assertion that the "deconstructionist" reading of a given work "is plainly and simply parasitical" on "the obvious or univocal reading."1 The latter is Abrams' phrase, the former Booth's. My citation of a citation is an example of a kind of chain which it will be part of my intention here to interrogate. What happens when a critical essay extracts a "passage" and "cites" it? Is this different from a…Read more
  •  12
    Theory and Practice: Response to Vincent Leitch
    Critical Inquiry 6 (4): 609-614. 1980.
    Leitch speaks of his procedure with my work as employing an "abrupt asyndetic format" and as being "a metonymic montage in which themes and citations are playfully and copiously combined." One form of this playfulness is the panoply of figures he uses to describe me and my criticism. The need to use figures for this is interesting, as is their incoherence, though the figures can be shown to fall into a rough antithetical pattern. At one moment the deconstructive critic is a fairy godmother able …Read more
  •  17
    On First Looking into Derrida's Glas
    Paragraph 39 (2): 129-148. 2016.
    This essay attempts to ‘read’ the first page of Jacques Derrida's Glas, while at the same time reporting as best I can what actually goes on when I make this effort of reading. I try to exemplify in detail my claim that what goes on in reading is much stranger and more complex that one might think. An intricate series of events took place when I first received Glas in the mail and opened it, reading first the single-sheet insert and then looking at the cover, the title page, and, finally, the fi…Read more
  •  29
    Moving Critical Inquiry On
    Critical Inquiry 30 (2): 414-420. 2004.
  •  251
    Literature Matters Today
    Substance 42 (2): 12-32. 2013.
    "Matters"! This is an odd word when used as a verb. Of course we know what it means. The verbal form of "matter" means "count for something," "have import," "have effects in the real world," "be worth taking seriously." Using the word as a noun, however, someone might speak of "literature matters," meaning the whole realm that involves literature. The Newsletter of the Maine Chapter of the Appalachian Mountain Club is called Wilderness Matters, punning on the word as a noun and as a verb. We mig…Read more
  •  22
    A woman's right to say no to a proposal of marriage, in defiance of her family and friends, was an essential feature of Victorian middle- and upper-class ideology, as it is represented in novels of the time. This right was based on the assumptions that falling in love is to some degree fortuitous, but that it is a permanent ontological change of selfhood. A good woman is justified in saying no even to an advantageous marriage proposal if she does not love her suitor. Anthony Trollope's novels of…Read more
  •  5
    Derrida enisled
    In William John Thomas Mitchell & Arnold Ira Davidson (eds.), The Late Derrida, University of Chicago Press. pp. 248-276. 2007.
  •  30
    Derrida Enisled
    Critical Inquiry 33 (2): 248. 2007.
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    Derrida and de Man: Two Rhetorics of Deconstruction
    In Zeynep Direk & Leonard Lawlor (eds.), A Companion to Derrida, Wiley. 2014.
    This chapter contrasts Derrida's strategies of “deconstruction” with Paul de Man's. It shows how each characteristically puts an essay together to make it performatively effective. The author's primary concern is to understand better Derrida's rhetorical strategies in his essays by contrasting them with de Man's. He begins the comparison with a description of de Man's essay. Unlike de Man's essay, Derrida's “Faith and Knowledge” does not end in a climactic unforeseen concluding formulation. It j…Read more
  •  11
    Boundaries in Beloved
    Symploke 15 (1): 24-39. 2007.
  •  106
    Derrida has been perennially concerned with hands and touching. This interest finds its most concentrated form in On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy. This text outlines a number of concerns Derrida has in that book which might be extrapolated as exemplary of Derrida's reading strategies in general. It concludes with a consideration of what is revealed about the Derrida-Nancy relationship in this book
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    This chapter addresses the question: Who or what decides? How, for Derrida, does a bona fide decision take place? Decision is analyzed in many places in Derrida's work, particularly in the late work. The chapter focuses “micrologically” on what seems to be Derrida's fullest and most elaborate expression of what he means by “decision.” This is an intricate sequence in “Force of Law”. It begins with an apparently peripheral subquestion. Can a decision be a catastrophe? If so, in what sense?
  •  126
    Anachronistic Reading
    Derrida Today 3 (1): 75-91. 2010.
    A poem encrypts, though not predictably, the effects it may have when at some future moment, in another context, it happens to be read and inscribed in a new situation, in ‘an interpretation that transforms the very thing it interprets’, as Jacques Derrida puts it in Specters of Marx. In Wallace Stevens's ‘The Man on the Dump’ (1942), we are told: ‘The dump is full/Of images’. The poem's movement is itself a complex temporal to and fro that aims to repudiate and even annihilate these images. Thi…Read more
  •  84
    J.S. Mill on Plural Voting, Competence and Participation
    History of Political Thought 24 (4): 647-667. 2003.
    J.S. Mill's plural voting proposal in Considerations on Representative Government presents political theorists with a puzzle: the elitist proposal that some individuals deserve a greater voice than others seems at odds with Mill's repeated arguments for the value of full participation in government. This essay looks at Mill's arguments for plural voting, arguing that, far from being motivated solely by elitism, Mill's account is actually driven by a commitment to both competence and participatio…Read more