front cover of Bakhtin and the Classics
Bakhtin and the Classics
R. Bracht Branham
Northwestern University Press, 2001
Mikhail Bakhtin's critical and theoretical experiments have inspired original work in the humanities and social sciences, but Bakhtin and the Classics is the first book to focus on the relationship between Bakhtin and classical studies, the discipline in which Bakhtin himself was trained. Clearly demonstrating the fundamental importance of classical literature in his work, Bakhtin and the Classics expands our understanding of both Bakhtin's thought and the literary and cultural history of antiquity. 

The authors, eminent classicists and distinguished critics of Bakhtin, put Bakhtin into dialogue with the classics--and classicists into dialogue with Bakhtin. Each essay offers a critical account of an important aspect of Bakhtin's thought and examines the value of his approach in the context of literary or cultural history. Beginning with an overview of Bakhtin's notion of carnival laughter, perhaps his central critical concept, the volume explores Bakhtin's thought and writing in relation to Homer's epic verse. Catullus's lyric poetry, ancient Roman novels, and Greek philosophy from Aristotle's theory of narrative to the work of Antiphon the Sophist. The results are of interest and importance to Bakhtinians, theorists, and classicists. 
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Philosophy Beside Itself
On Deconstruction and Modernism
Stephen W. MelvilleForeword by Donald Marshall
University of Minnesota Press, 1986

Philosophy Beside Itself was first published in 1986. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

The writings of French philosopher Jacques Derrida have been the single most powerful influence on critical theory and practice in the United States over the past decade. But with few exceptions American philosophers have taken little or no interest in Derrida's work, and the task of reception, translation, and commentary has been left to literary critics. As a result, Derrida has appeared as a figure already defined by essentially literary critical activities and interests.

Stephen Melville's aim in Philosophy Beside Itself is to insist upon and clarify the distinctions between philosophy and criticism. He argues that until we grasp Derrida's philosophical project as such, we remain fundamentally unable to see his significance for criticism. In terms derived from Stanley Cavell's writings on modernism, Melville develops a case for Derrida as a modernist philosopher, working at once within and against that tradition and discipline.

Melville first places Derrida in a Hegelian context, the structure of which he explores by examining the work of Heidegger, Lacan, and Bataille. With this foundation, he is able to reappraise the project of deconstructive criticism as developed in Paul de Man's Blindness and Insight and further articulated by other Yale critics. Central to this critique is the ambivalent relationship between deconstructive criticism and Lacanian psychoanalysis. Criticism—radical self-criticism—is a central means through which the difficult facts of human community come to recognition, and Melville argues for criticism as an activity intimately bound to the ways in which we do and do not belong in time and in community. Derrida's achievement has been to find a new and necessary way to assert that the task of philosophy is criticism; the task of literary criticism is to assume the burden of that achievement.

Stephen Melville is an assistant professor of English at Syracuse University, and Donald Marshall is a professor of English at the University of Iowa.

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Wittgenstein's Ladder
Poetic Language and the Strangeness of the Ordinary
Marjorie Perloff
University of Chicago Press, 1996
Marjorie Perloff, among our foremost critics of twentieth-century poetry, argues that Ludwig Wittgenstein provided writers with a radical new aesthetic, a key to recognizing the inescapable strangeness of ordinary language. Taking seriously Wittgenstein's remark that "philosophy ought really to be written only as a form of poetry," Perloff begins by discussing Wittgenstein the "poet." What we learn is that the poetics of everyday life is anything but banal.

"This book has the lucidity and the intelligence we have come to expect from Marjorie Perloff.—Linda Munk, American Literature

"[Perloff] has brilliantly adapted Wittgenstein's conception of meaning and use to an analysis of contemporary language poetry."—Linda Voris, Boston Review

"Wittgenstein's Ladder offers significant insights into the current state of poetry, literature, and literary study. Perloff emphasizes the vitality of reading and thinking about poetry, and the absolute necessity of pushing against the boundaries that define and limit our worlds."—David Clippinger, Chicago Review

"Majorie Perloff has done more to illuminate our understanding of twentieth century poetic language than perhaps any other critic. . . . Entertaining, witty, and above all highly original."—Willard Bohn, Sub-Stance
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