Product Description

With a special focus on Derrida's relevance for literary and cultural studies, this text offers invaluable advice on reading Derrida's texts and guidance on the vast range of criticism responses to his work.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #245839 in Books
• Published on: 2003-03-13
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 208 pages

Review
'Excellent, strong, clear and original' - Jacques Derrida - commenting on this volume

'A strong, inventive and daring book thatdoes much more than most introductions are capable of dreaming' - Diane Elam, Cardiff University

'Readers couldn't ask for a more authoritative and knowledgeable guide. Although there is no playing down of the immensity of Derrida's work, Royle's direct and often funny mode of address will make it less threatening than it can often appear to beginners.' - Derek Attridge

'Royle has the admirable gift of rendering the most difficult material accessible to students ... he can make it exciting to them, inspiring them to read more.' - Critical and Cultural Theory

From the Back Cover
This volume introduces students of literature and cultural studies to Derrida's enormously influential texts, presenting covering such topics as:
*deconstruction, text and difference
*literature and freedom
*law, justice and the 'democracy to come'
*drugs, secrets and gifts.
Nicholas Royle's unique guide, written in an innovative and original style, is an outstanding introduction to the methods and significance of Jacques Derrida.

About the Author
Nicholas Royle is Professor of English and American Studies at the University of Sussex. He is Joint Editor of the Oxford Literary Review and author of several influential texts. His recent publications include Deconstructions: A User's Guide and The Uncanny: An Introduction.

Customer Reviews

it lets you think
If you want to feel what Derrida and deconstruction are like, this book is for you.

Always clear and rigorous, Royle cuts to the chase and writes with an immediate, infectious pleasure in thinking and reading. Beginners, the half-interested and long-term fans of Derrida will all find much that is new to them here: Royle is extremely well-informed about Derrida - he's read the lot, and reports accurately on areas of Derrida's work that more workaday accounts seem barely aware of. He explains specialist terms like 'supplement' and 'differance' with a sense not just of what they mean but of why they matter and where they might go.

Lastly, what's really special about this book for me is the way Royle writes. The words are ones we use and live in, but in his hands funnier, stranger, more moving, more alive than ever.

Constructing Derrida...
Nicholas Royle's text on Jacques Derrida is part of a recent series put out by the Routledge Press, designed under the general editorial direction of Robert Eaglestone (Royal Holloway, University of London), to explore the most recent and exciting ideas in intellectual development during the past century or so. To this end, figures such as Martin Heidegger, Sigmund Freud, Friedrich Nietzsche, Paul Ricoeur, and other influential thinkers in critical thought are highlighted in the series, planned to include at least 21 volumes in all.

Royle's text, following the pattern of the others, includes background information on Derrida and its significance, the key ideas and sources, and Derrida's continuing impact on other thinkers. As the series preface indicates, no critical thinker arises in a vacuum, so the context, influences and broader cultural environment are all important as a part of the study, something with which Derrida might agree.

Why is Derrida included in this series? It is hard to come up with a more wide-ranging and influential thinker in the twentieth century than Jacques Derrida. While starting out in the literary field as a primary focus, his thought and intellectual influence has extended far beyond to almost every academic field. Particularly in the areas of philosophy, politics, law, theology, sociology, psychology and science, Derrida's influence will continue to be significant for a number of reasons.

Royle's text is very interesting, as I knew it would be from the start, but one of the truly surprising aspects of this text was that it was fun to read. From the very first page, when I saw that the first comment on the text was from Derrida himself, I knew that inside there would be creativity and humour, pieces of interest and insight. Derrida's comment, with which I completely agree, is that this text is 'Excellent, strong, clear and original.' One might consider it ironic that in a text dealing essentially with an overview of another's thought, there would be little room for originality. However, this is to miss a great deal of what Derrida tries to say, and something that one gets out of this text. All things are new and renewed; even the re-hash of old thoughts becomes unique and original.

I did not know it at the time I began reading, but the book is designed so that each chapter can be a stand-alone essay, peripherally related to each other, but not dependent upon any particular order of reading. I say this because I started near the end of the book. There is a chapter entitled 'Poetry Break' – being an erstwhile poet of sorts, this was automatically of interest. But when I noticed that Royle had selected Coleridge's 'Kubla Kahn' as the example. This is one of my favourite poems, and the application of Derrida's principles opened up interesting insights. One key insight (if I am permitted to use that phrase, as Royle argues that the idea of key insights is a foreign concept for Derrida) has to do with the unreadability of the poem – how can we tell what it means? It goes beyond reason, certainly, and is hardly just a drug-induced reverie. It contains a gift and an element of poetry difficult to discern, an infinite and unknowable element that nonetheless speaks to us in unique ways.

Part of the problem of putting Derrida into a series like this is that the series requires the identification of key ideas. Royle states that there is few things less like Derrida's thought than to attempt to organise his ideas into a string of 'key ideas'. Here the humour is introduced again – one feature of the Routledge texts is to have key idea and explication boxes, separated out from the rest of the text. That doesn't happen much in this volume, as Royle tries to remain clear of putting 'Jacque in the Box'. The only such pull-text box asks the question, 'What is a box?' and proceeds to deconstruct and destroy the idea of using this as a working principle in the book.

Ah, there, I've said it. If there is a key idea to be identified in Derrida's work, it is Deconstruction. This is perhaps what Derrida is destined to be known for, the relentless pursuit of deconstructing everything in his path. Derrida himself doesn't care much for the word, but the underlying purpose is crucial. Deconstruction works from the principle that everything is divisible, and that there is value in shaking things up, a sort of seismic communication theory. This leads to the ideas of text, supplement, differance, and even monsters.

Monsters, you say? Surely a lot of modern and postmodern thought is monstrous, in a number of ways. Derrida would say yes! The monstrous is always around us – Shelley's Frankenstein is not simply a monster tale, but is also a moral and political lesson. We can apply the idea of the monstrous to the future – it is something unknown, and therefore frightening; monsters cease to be monsters once they are domesticated, once they are known. Derrida believes that much of religious faith is based upon the monstrous – Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac, Jesus on the cross, these are monstrous things, that once they become known and transformed in new ways, cease their monstrosity. Of course, some of the ways in which these have been domesticated becomes once again monstrous.

As do the other volumes in this series, Royle concludes with an annotated bibliography of works by Derrida, works on Derrida, interview transcripts (Royle mentions a number of times that Derrida is known for talking as much as writing), and a listing of the top ten initial suggestions for those who want an accessible introduction to Derrida's work.

Intriguing and unexpectedly humourous, this is one of the better books I've read in a very long time.

No way in
Royle's book really is not suitable for a generally educated reader or student who seeks help with entry into Derrida's world. He, imaginatively and perhaps quite reasonably, situates himself entirely within Derrida's mysterious language and patterns of operation and offers a picture of complexity and puzzlement painted in colours of equal complexity and puzzlement. He is absolutely unwilling to risk any inappropriate simplifications for the benefit of guiding the reader gently towards Derrida.

I would have liked to see some challenge to or at reflection on the (at least apparent) obscurity and complexity of Derrida's writing, rather than simply a joyful and exuberant wandering in his world of paradox and slipperiness. This is fine for those who are already comfortable there, but not helpful to the new student.

Ultimately, for the newcomer, the whole book fails to answer the central question, explicitly dodged in the first chapter, of "Why Derrida?". I ended the book as I began, interested in Derrida because so many people I respect report to me his worth, eager to feel what that value is, yet clueless.