Signature Pieces: On the Institution of Authorship

by Peggy Kamuf

Overview

Some contemporary approaches to literature still accept the separation of historical, biographical, external concerns from formal, internal ones. On the borderline that lends this division between inside and outside its apparent coherence is signature. In Peggy Kamuf’s view, studying signature will help us to rediscover some of the stakes of literary writing beyond the historicist/formalist opposition. Drawing on Derrida’s extensive work on signatures and proper names, Kamuf investigates authorial signature in key writers from Rousseau to Woolf, as well as the implications of signature for the institutions of authorship and criticism.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781501726378
Publisher:	Cornell University Press
Publication date:	03/15/2018
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	252
File size:	374 KB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Peggy Kamuf is Marion Frances Chevalier Professor of French and Professor of French and Italian and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California. She is the author of The Division of Literature, or the University in Deconstruction and To Follow: The Wake of Jacques Derrida.

Editorial Reviews

The strange embrace of dominance and opposition, of denial and return is what we witness in contemporary criticism; but Kamuf’s demanding and rewarding book teaches that that ‘scene’ is part of what has been a longer playing drama.

French Forum - Ross Chambers

The strength of Signature Pieces does not lie in its illumination of any particular corpus of texts, historical period, author, or genre, but in its rigorous use of deconstructive logic to walk the tightrope between the opposed reductions of historicism and formalism.

Comparative Literature - William Ray

The strange embrace of dominance and opposition, of denial and return is what we witness in contemporary criticism; but Kamuf's demanding and rewarding book teaches that that 'scene' is part of what has been a longer playing drama.

--Ross Chambers "French Forum"

The strength of Signature Pieces does not lie in its illumination of any particular corpus of texts, historical period, author, or genre, but in its rigorous use of deconstructive logic to walk the tightrope between the opposed reductions of historicism and formalism.

--William Ray "Comparative Literature"

From the Publisher