An important new book analyzing the way in which Richard Rorty has tried to reconcile the thought of Jacques Derrida with the American pragmatist and liberal tradition.

By locatingthe architecture already hidden within deconstructive discourse, Wigley opens up more radical possibilities for both architectureand deconstruction.

The Animal That Therefore I Am is the long-awaited translation of the complete text of Jacques Derrida's ten-hour address to the 1997 Cérisy conference entitled "The Autobiographical Animal," the third of four such colloquia on his work. The book was assembled posthumously on the basis of two published sections, one written and recorded session, and one informal recorded session. The book is at once an affectionate look back over the multiple roles played by animals in Derrida's work and a profound philosophical investigation and critique of the relegation of animal life that takes place as a result of the distinction--dating from Descartes--between man as thinking animal and every other living species. That starts with the very fact of the line of separation drawn between the human and the millions of other species that are reduced to a single "the animal." Derrida finds that distinction, or versions of it, surfacing in thinkers as far apart as Descartes, Kant, Heidegger, Lacan, and Levinas, and he dedicates extended analyses to the question in the work of each of them. The book's autobiographical theme intersects with its philosophical analysis through the figures of looking and nakedness, staged in terms of Derrida's experience when his cat follows him into the bathroom in the morning. In a classic deconstructive reversal, Derrida asks what this animal sees and thinks when it sees this naked man. Yet the experiences of nakedness and shame also lead all the way back into the mythologies of "man's dominion over the beasts" and trace a history of how man has systematically displaced onto the animal his own failings or bêtises. The Animal That Therefore I Am is at times a militant plea and indictment regarding, especially, the modern industrialized treatment of animals. However, Derrida cannot subscribe to a simplistic version of animal rights that fails to follow through, in all its implications, the questions and definitions of "life" to which he returned in much of his later work.

Why did deconstruction emerge when it did? Why did commentators in literary studies seem to need to look back on it from the earliest moments of its emergence? This book argues that the invention of deconstruction was spread across several decades, conducted by many people, and focused on its two central figures, Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man.

Explores Derrida's major work through readings of key passages by such leading scholars as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, J. Hillis Miller and Derek Attridge.

Modern North American Criticism and Theory presents the reader with a comprehensive and critical introduction to the development and institutionalization of literary and cultural studies throughout the twentieth century and at the beginning of the twenty-first. Focusing on the growth and expansion of critical trends and methodologies, with particular essays addressing key figures in their historical and cultural contexts, the book offers a narrative of change, transformation, and the continuous quest for and affirmation of multiple cultural voices and identities. From semiotics and the New Criticism to the identity politics of whiteness studies and the cultural study of masculinity, this book provides an overview of literary and cultural study in North America as a history of questioning, debate, and exploration.