Barbara Johnson

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Barbara Ellen Johnson (October 4, 1947 – August 27, 2009) was an American

She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1985 for French Literature.^[2]

Overview of major works

In her 1990 essay, "Writing" (in Critical Terms for Literary Study), Johnson outlines the importance of

The Critical Difference

In The Critical Difference (1980), Johnson argues that any model of difference as a polarized difference "between entities (prose and poetry, man and woman, literature and theory, guilt and innocence)" is necessarily founded upon "a repression of differences within entities" (pp. x-xi). In this book, Johnson explores how the unknown and the unknowable function in a text. The "unknown" to which she refers is not something concealed or distant, but a fundamental unknowability that constitutes and underlies our linguistic cognition.

In one of the articles in The Critical Difference, "Melville's Fist: The Execution of

Johnson's next book, A World of Difference (1987), reflects a move away from the strictly canonical context of her analyses in The Critical Difference. Johnson wants to take her investigation beyond "the white male Euro-American literary, philosophical, psychoanalytical, and critical canon" that dominates the academy as a whole and her work in particular.^[3] But she also calls the "sameness" of that white Euro-American literary and critical tradition into question, undertaking a thorough interrogation of its boundaries. In addition, Johnson expands the scope of her literary subjects to include black and/or women writers, such as Zora Neale Hurston, Dorothy Dinnerstein, James Weldon Johnson, and Adrienne Rich. Her subsequent collection, The Feminist Difference (1998), offers a continued critique of the terms in play throughout feminism's history and an examination of the differences within and between feminisms.

The Wake of Deconstruction

The Wake of Deconstruction (1994) approaches the general state of

In "Taking Fidelity Philosophically" (in Difference in Translation), Johnson describes translation as an ultimately impossible endeavor because the "mother" or original language is already, intrinsically untranslatable from signifier to signified. The more one attempts to translate a work into comprehensibility, the more likely one is to stray from its original ambiguity. Jacques Derrida, with his thoughts on différance, elucidates the complicating but necessary fact of language: that it is foreign to itself. Every attempt to translate sets the language against itself, creating new tensions as it progresses. Translation, though impossible, is also necessary, as it is precisely these tensions that constitute language.

Deconstruction, indeterminacy, and politics

Throughout her work, Johnson emphasizes both the difficulty of applying

Johnson was diagnosed with cerebellar ataxia in 2001. She continued to write and advise graduate students until her death in 2009.^[6]

Publications

Selected works

• Persons and Things (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008)
• Mother Tongues: Sexuality, Trials, Motherhood, Translation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003)
• "Using People: Kant with Winnicott," in The Turn to Ethics, ed. Marjorie Garber, Beatrice Hanssen, and Rebecca L. Walkowitz (New York: Routledge, 2000) (reprinted in Persons and Things)
• "Anthropomorphism in Lyric and Law," in the Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities, 10 Yale J.L. & Human. 549 (Summer 1998) (reprinted in Persons and Things)
• "Moses and Intertextuality: Sigmund Freud, Zora Neale Hurston, and the Bible," in Poetics of the Americas, ed. Bainard Cowan and Jefferson Humphries (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997)
• The Feminist Difference: Literature, Psychoanalysis, Race and Gender (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998)
• The Wake of Deconstruction (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994)
• "Writing," in Critical Terms for Literary Study, ed. Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990)
• A World of Difference (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987)
• "Taking Fidelity Philosophically," in Difference in Translation, ed. Joseph F. Graham (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985)
• The Critical Difference: Essays in the Contemporary Rhetoric of Reading (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980)
• Défigurations du langage poétique: La seconde révolution baudelairienne (Paris: Flammarion, 1979)
• "The Frame of Reference: Poe, Lacan, Derrida," in Yale French Studies, no. 55/56 (1977): pp. 457–505 (reprinted in The Purloined Poe, 1988)

Edited volumes and projects

• The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, Principal ed.,
  John McGowan, and Jeffery J. Williams
  (New York: Norton, 2001)
• Freedom and Interpretation: The Oxford Amnesty Lectures, 1992 (New York: Basic Books, 1993)
• Consequences of Theory: Selected Papers from the English Institute, 1987-1988, ed. with Jonathan Arac (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990)
• A New History of French Literature, Principal ed., Dennis Hollier (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989)
• Yale French Studies, No. 63, "The Pedagogical Imperative: Teaching as a Literary Genre" (1982)

Translations

• Stéphane Mallarmé, Divagations (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007)
• Jacques Derrida, Dissemination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981)
• Philippe Sollers, "Freud's Hand," in Yale French Studies, No. 55-56 (1979)
• Jacques Derrida, "Fors: The Anglish Words of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok," in the Georgia Review, No. 31 (1977)

See also

• List of deconstructionists

References

External links

• Barbara Johnson remembered at the Harvard University Press Blog.
• Literary luminary passes away The Harvard Crimson.
• Difference: Reading with Barbara Johnson, a special issue of Differences (2007)
• [1], Barbara Johnson's memorial service
• Barbara Johnson Papers, Pembroke Center Archives, Brown University