Paul de Man died of cancer in 1983 at the relatively early age of sixtyfour. Towards the end of those sixty-four years he had begun to emerge as a literary critic and philosophical thinker of international standing. At his memorial service the French philosopher Jacques Derrida described his friend’s achievement as a transformation of ‘the field of literary theory, revitalising all the channels that irrigate it both inside and outside the university, in the United States and Europe’ (Derrida 1989, vxii).
American Theorists of the Novel - Henry James, Lionel Trilling, Wayne C. Booth (Routledge CriticalWhy read James, Trilling, and Booth? The answer may not be immediatelyobvious. Writing from the 1860s and through to the early twentieth century, Henry James (1843–1916) is most widely renowned for works such as The Wings of the Dove (1902b), The Golden Bowl (1904), The Portrait of a Lady (1881), and his ghost story, ‘The Turn of the Screw’ (1898). But he also published ground-breaking prefaces to his own fiction and numerous critical essays. Lionel Trilling (1905–75) became well known as a literary critic in a 1950s academic scene dominated by, as we shall see, the ‘New Criticism’ of earlier decades.
Rather than begin this book with a potted explanation of Antonio Gramsci’s thought, I want you answer the question ‘Why Gramsci?’ yourself, by ‘doing’ some Gramscian analysis, albeit analysis of a cultural form with which Gramsci himself would have been entirely unfamiliar. Take a piece of participato
Why Derrida? In accordance with the ‘similar structure’ (p. ix) of each book in this series, Routledge Critical Thinkers, I must begin by trying to respond to this question – with luck in ways that will interest and even amuse you (since the question, I confess, is not one that I am able to take altogether seriously, for reasons that I hope will become clear). No doubt there will have been some minimal understanding already presupposed here: ‘Derrida’ is not the name of some new high-energy drink or a prospective location for the next Olympic Games.
Shakespeare’s plays continue to be circulated on a massive scale in a variety of guises – as editions, performances, and adaptations – and it is by means of such mediation that we come to know his drama. Shakespeare and the Problem of Adaptation addresses fundamental questions about this process of mediation, making use of the fraught category of adaptation to explore how we currently understand the Shakespearean work. To adapt implies there exists something to alter, but what constitutes the category of the ‘play’, and how does it relate to adaptation? How do ‘play’ and ‘adaptation’ relate to drama’s twin media, text and performance?
