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Signature Pieces
On the Institution of Authorship
Peggy Kamuf (Author)
9781501726361
Paperback / softback, published 15 August 2018
252 pages
21.6 x 14 x 1.8 cm, 0.454 kg
The strange embrace of dominance and opposition, of denial and return is what we witness in contemporary criticism; but Kamuf's demanding and rewarding book teaches that that 'scene' is part of what has been a longer playing drama. The strength of Signature Pieces does not lie in its illumination of any particular corpus of texts, historical period, author, or genre, but in its rigorous use of deconstructive logic to walk the tightrope between the opposed reductions of historicism and formalism.
Some contemporary approaches to literature still accept the separation of historical, biographical, external concerns from formal, internal ones. On the borderline that lends this division between inside and outside its apparent coherence is signature. In Peggy Kamuf's view, studying signature will help us to rediscover some of the stakes of literary writing beyond the historicist/formalist opposition. Drawing on Derrida's extensive work on signatures and proper names, Kamuf investigates authorial signature in key writers from Rousseau to Woolf, as well as the implications of signature for the institutions of authorship and criticism.