Applied Grammatology

Originally published in 1984. In Applied Grammatology, Gregory Ulmer provides an extraordinary introduction to the third, "applied" phase of grammatology, the "science of writing," outlined by Jacques Derrida in Of Grammatology. Ulmer looks to the later experimental works of Derrida (beginning with Glas and continuing through Truth in Painting and The Post Card). In these, he discovers a critical methodology radically different from the deconstruction for which Derrida is known. At the same time, he finds the source of a new pedagogy for all the humanities, one based on grammatology and appropriate to the era of audiovisual communications in which we live. Detractors of Derrida often accuse him of superficial wordplay and of using images and puns as nonfunctional subversions of academic conventions. Ulmer argues that there is, in fact, a fully developed use of homonyms in Derrida's style, which produces its own distinctive knowledge and insight. Derrida's experiments with images, moreover—his expansion of descriptions of everyday objects such as umbrellas, matchboxes, and post cards into cognitive models—serve to reveal a simplicity underlying intellectual discourse, which could be used to eliminate the gap separating the general public from specialists in cultural studies. Comparing the stylistic innovations of Derrida with Jacques Lacan's use of puns and diagrams, with the German performance artist Joseph Beuys's demonstration of models, and with the "montage writing" of the films of Sergei Eisenstein, Ulmer explores the possibility of deriving a postmodernist pedagogy from Derrida's texts. The first study to suggest the full potential of the program available in Derrida's writings, Applied Grammatology is also the first outline of a Derridean alternative to deconstructionism. With its shift away from Derrida's philosophical studies to his experimental texts, Ulmer's book aims to inaugurate a new movement in the American adaptation of contemporary French theory.

Originally published in 1984. In Applied Grammatology, Gregory Ulmer provides an extraordinary introduction to the third, "applied" phase of grammatology, the "science of writing," outlined by Jacques Derrida in Of Grammatology. Ulmer looks to the later experimental works of Derrida (beginning with Glas and continuing through Truth in Painting and The Post Card). In these, he discovers a critical methodology radically different from the deconstruction for which Derrida is known. At the same time, he finds the source of a new pedagogy for all the humanities, one based on grammatology and appropriate to the era of audiovisual communications in which we live. Detractors of Derrida often accuse him of superficial wordplay and of using images and puns as nonfunctional subversions of academic conventions. Ulmer argues that there is, in fact, a fully developed use of homonyms in Derrida's style, which produces its own distinctive knowledge and insight. Derrida's experiments with images, moreover—his expansion of descriptions of everyday objects such as umbrellas, matchboxes, and post cards into cognitive models—serve to reveal a simplicity underlying intellectual discourse, which could be used to eliminate the gap separating the general public from specialists in cultural studies. Comparing the stylistic innovations of Derrida with Jacques Lacan's use of puns and diagrams, with the German performance artist Joseph Beuys's demonstration of models, and with the "montage writing" of the films of Sergei Eisenstein, Ulmer explores the possibility of deriving a postmodernist pedagogy from Derrida's texts. The first study to suggest the full potential of the program available in Derrida's writings, Applied Grammatology is also the first outline of a Derridean alternative to deconstructionism. With its shift away from Derrida's philosophical studies to his experimental texts, Ulmer's book aims to inaugurate a new movement in the American adaptation of contemporary French theory.

With Possible Worlds of Fiction and History, Lubomír Doležel reexamines the claim—made first by Roland Barthes and then popularized by Hayden White—that "there is no fundamental distinction between fiction and history." Doležel rejects this assertion and demonstrates how literary and discourse theory can help the historian to restate the difference between fiction and history. He challenges scholars to reassess the postmodern viewpoint by reintroducing the idea of possible worlds. Possible-worlds semantics reveals that possible worlds of fiction and possible worlds of history differ in their origins, cultural functions, and structural and semantic features. Doležel’s book is the first systematic application of this idea to the theory and philosophy of history. Possible Worlds of Fiction and History is the crowning work of one of literary theory’s most engaged thinkers.

Actionable Media' illuminates the new wave of digital communication and culture emerging from the rise of ubiquitous computing.

Norris demonstrates that Derrida's texts should be understood more as philosophy than as literature. He explains the position of Derrida's writing within the Western philosophical tradition and discusses some of the reasons for the massive institutional resistance that has so far prevented philosophers from engaging seriously with Derrida's work.

Where do writers of fiction get their ideas? Clayton Koelb here takes issue with those who regard inspiration or imitation as primary forces influencing literary invention. He finds that another mechanism, which he calls "rhetorical construction," underlies much fiction and some nonfiction as well. Rhetorical construction, Koelb says, is a way of producing writing out of reading. The rhetorical writer begins by discovering an interpretive crux in a familiar text-a passage from the Bible, for example, or a commonplace expression—and then proceeds to imagine a fictional situation in which all the meanings of the passage, contradictory though they may seem, may be realized. According to Koelb, "inventions of reading" do not stop with the discovery of the eternal and inevitable deconstructibility of language; they somehow generate an urge to put language back together through the invention of a fictional world. Among the texts he discusses are writings by Boccaccio, Rabelais, Goethe, Schiller, Kleist, Hawthorne, Hans Christian Andersen Nietzsche, Kafka, Calvino, and Flannery O'Connor.

“Cultural Graphology” could be the name of a new human science: this was Derrida’s speculation when, in the late 1960s, he imagined a discipline that combined psychoanalysis, deconstruction, and a commitment to the topic of writing. He never undertook the project himself but did leave two brief sketches of how he thought cultural graphology might proceed. In this book, Juliet Fleming picks up where Derrida left off. Using both his early and later thought, and the psychoanalytic texts to which it is addressed, to examine the print culture of early modern England, she drastically unsettles some key assumptions of book history. Fleming shows that the single most important lesson to survive from Derrida’s early work is that we do not know what writing is. Channeling Derrida’s thought into places it has not been seen before, she examines printed errors, spaces, and ornaments (topics that have hitherto been marginal to our accounts of print culture) and excavates the long-forgotten reading practice of cutting printed books. Proposing radical deformations to the meanings of fundamental and apparently simple terms such as “error,” “letter,” “surface,” and “cut,” Fleming opens up exciting new pathways into our understanding of writing all told.

This book disentangles two terms that were conflated in the initial Anglo-American appropriation of French theory: deconstruction and poststructuralism. Focusing on Sartre, Derrida, Foucault, and Baudrillard (but also considering Levinas, Blanchot, de Man, and others), it traces the turn from a deconstruction inflected by phenomenology to a poststructuralism formed by the rejection of models based on consciousness in favor of ones based on language and structure. The book provides a wide-ranging and complex genealogy of French theory from the 1940s onward, placing particular emphasis on the largely neglected early work of the theorists involved and on deconstruction's continuing relevance. The author argues that deconstruction is a form of radical, antiscientific modernity: an interdisciplinary reconfiguration of philosophy as it confronted the positivism of the human sciences in the 1960s. By contrast, poststructuralism is a type of postmodern theory inflected by changes in technology and the mode of information. Inasmuch as poststructuralism is founded upon its "constitutive loss" of phenomenology (in Judith Butler's phrase), the author is also concerned with the ways phenomenology (particularly Sartre's forgotten but seminal Being and Nothingness) is remembered, repeated in different ways, and never quite worked through in its theoretical successors. Thus the book also exemplifies a way of reading intellectual history that is not only concerned with the transmission of concepts, but also with the processes of transference, mourning, and disavowal that inform the relationships between bodies of thought.