The Question of Textuality: Strategies of Reading in Contemporary American Criticism

From dust jacket notes: "The spirited exchange of ideas that unfolds in this volume affirms the ascendancy of post-structuralist thought in American criticism. While the writers for the most part assume that both New Critical and Humanistic rhetorics are no longer viable alternatives for the critical intellectual in America, some contributors do suggest that new alignments might be possible between, on the one hand, New Criticism and Humanism, and, on the other, structuralist poetics, post-structuralism, and phenomenology. The ideal critic who emerges from this book is a general intellectual, no longer restricting his or her procedures to textual analysis. The degree and nature of the movement beyond textual explication varies from, for example, Edward Said's passionate insistence on affiliating what one says about a literary text with history and power, to, for example, David Allison's Derridean reading of the figure of 'woman' in Nietzsche. But there is no doubt that these essays sho