Glas - Softcover

Derrida, Jacques; Leavey, John P., Jr.; Rand, Richard

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0803265816 ISBN 13: 9780803265813

Publisher: University of Nebraska Press, 1986

Synopsis

Jacques Derrida is probably the most famous European philosopher alive today. The University of Nebraska Press makes available for the first English translation of his most important work to date, Glas. Its appearance will assist Derrida's readers pro and con in coming to terms with a complex and controversial book. Glas extensively reworks the problems of reading and writing in philosophy and literature; questions the possibility of linear reading and its consequent notions of theme, author, narrative, and discursive demonstration; and ingeniously disrupts the positions of reader and writer in the text.

Glas is extraordinary in many ways, most obviously in its typography. Arranged in two columns, with inserted sections within these, the book simultaneously discusses Hegel’s philosophy and Jean Genet’s fiction, and shows how two such seemingly distinct kinds of criticism can reflect and influence one another. The customary segregation of philosophy, rhetoric, psychoanalysis, linguistics, history, and poetics is systematically subverted. In design and content, the books calls into question “types” of literature (history, philosophy, literary criticism), the ownership of ideas and styles, the glorification of literary heroes, and the limits of literary representation.

About this title

About the Author:

Derrida authorized this translation by John P. Leavey, Jr., and Richard Rand. Leavey, who teaches at the University of Florida, has also translated Derrida's Edmund Husserl's Origin of Geometry: An Introduction (available in paperback from the University of Nebraska Press) and is the author of Glassary (1986), a companion volume to Glas published by the University of Nebraska Press. Rand, who teaches at the University of Alabama, has translated Derrida's Signsponge (1984).

Language Notes:

Text: English, French (translation)

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
• Publication date: 1986
• ISBN 10: 0803265816
• ISBN 13: 9780803265813
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 262