Reading and Responsibility

Derek Attridge is Emeritus Professor in the Department of English and Related Literature at the University of York and Fellow of the British Academy. He is the author or editor of thirty books across a number of fields, including literary theory, South African literature, the history and forms of poetry and the work of James Joyce. His most recent publications are, as author, The Experience of Poetry: From Homer’s Listeners to Shakespeare’s Readers (2019) and The Work of Literature (2015) and, as co-editor, In a Province: Studies in the Writing of South Africa by Graham Pechey (2022), Literature and Event: Twenty-First Century Reformulations (2021) and The Work of Reading: Literary Criticism in the 21st Century (2021). He was the first recipient of the Robert Fitzgerald Prosody Prize and his book The Singularity of Literature won the European Society for the Study of English Prize for literary studies in 2006. He has held a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Leverhulme Research Professorship and fellowships at the Camargo Foundation, the Bogliasco Foundation, the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study, the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies, the National Humanities Centre and All Souls and St Catherine’s Colleges, Oxford. Before moving to York, he held posts at the universities of Oxford, Southampton, Strathclyde and at Rutgers University, New Jersey. Temporary positions have included Visiting Professorships in the USA, Italy, France, South Africa and Egypt.

• Introduction; 1. Deconstruction Today; 2. Singularities, Responsibilities: Derrida, Deconstruction, and Literary Criticism; 3. Following Derrida; 4. The Impossibility of Ethics; 5. Arche-Jargon; 6. Deconstruction and Fiction; 7. Posthumous Infidelity: Derrida, Levinas and the Third; 8. Roland Barthes's Obtuse, Sharp Meaning and the Responsibilities of Commentary; 9. Nothing to Declare: J. Hillis Miller and Zero's Paradox; 10. The Place of Deconstruction: a dialogue with Jean-Michel Rabaté; 11. Coetzee's Artists, Coetzee's Art.

This wonderful book admirably displays Derek Attridge's special gifts as a reader: clarity, learning, and penetrating understanding. It contains some of the best essays ever written about what is distinctive in Derrida's thinking.