By John A. Hodgson (NHC Fellow, 1981–82) The English Romantic writers and poets valued a genuine coherence of image and idea. Striving for organic form, they were faced with the challenge of using figuration – metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche – to represent the essentially unrepresentable: God, ultimate power, the human mind and psyche, what Shelley called … Continued
By Mark C. Taylor (NHC Fellow, 1982–83) The Erring a/theologian is driven to consider and reconsider errant notions: transgression, subversion, mastery, utility, consumption, domination, narcissism, nihilism, possession, uncanniness, repetition, tropes, writing dissemination, dispossession, expropriation, impropriety, anonymity, spending, sacrificed, death, desire, delight, wandering, aberrance, carnival, comedy, superficiality, carnality, duplicity, shiftiness, undecidability, and spinning.
By Alice Kaplan (NHC Fellow, 1989–90) Brilliantly uniting the personal and the critical, French Lessons is a powerful autobiographical experiment. It tells the story of an American woman escaping into the French language and of a scholar and teacher coming to grips with her history of learning. Kaplan begins with a distinctly American quest for an imaginary … Continued
By William C. Dowling (NHC Fellow, 1979–80) In this deconstructionist interpretation of a major eighteenth-century work, William Dowling analyzes Boswell’s Life of Johnson as a paradigm of antithetical structure in narrative, and develops a grammar of discontinuity” for interpreting other texts as well.
By Evelyn Barish (NHC Fellow, 1993–94) Over thirty years after his death in 1983, Paul de Man, a hugely charismatic intellectual who created with deconstruction an ideology so pervasive that it threatened to topple the very foundations of literature, remains a haunting and still largely unexamined figure. Deeply influential, de Man and his theory-driven philosophy … Continued
By Eugene Goodheart (NHC Fellow, 1987–88) Eugene Goodheart examines the skeptic disposition that has informed advanced literary discourse over the past generation, arguing that the targets of deconstructive suspicion are fundamental humanistic values.