Reading Theory

'Deconstruction', 'psychoanalysis', and 'semiotics' have become part of the vocabulary of contempoorary culture. Reading Theory introduces the principal texts by Derrida, Lacan and Kristeva that are behind these terms and that provide their contexts. This book concentrates its attention on making accessible what these three theorists have written, rather than offering a synthetic construction of the fashionable terminology of theory.

• Works carefully through key texts by the leading contemporary theorists
• Clear, accessible and introductory
• Challenges recent attacks on theory and on Derrida.

List of Plates.

Preface.

Acknowledgements.

List of Abbreviations.

1. Theoretical Beginnings: Introductions to Lacan, Derrida and Kristeva.

2. Ecrits: A Selection.

3. Of Grammatology.

4. Revolution in Poetic Language.

5. Reading Paintings.

Appendix I: Lacan's Use of Freud's German Terms.

Appendix II: Derrida's Abbreviated Citations.

Appendix III: Some Kristevan Terms.

Index.

"[Shows] perception and originality." Julia Kristeva

"By intensive reading clarified by historical and intertexual contexts of each of the authors, he achieves a series of brilliant explications".... I have never read a more lucid explanation of these ideas". James R. Bennett, University of Arkansas

Michael Payne is John P. Crozer Professor and Heaad of English at Bucknell University, Pennsylvania. He is the author of Irony in Shakespeare's Roman Plays and the editor of several volumes of criticism and theory, including the forthcoming Blackwell Dictionary of Cultural and Critical Theory. "Deconstruction," "psychoanalysis," and "semiotics" have becoem part of the vocabulary of contempoarry culture. Reading Theory introduces the principal texts by Lacan, Derrida, and Kristeva that lie behind these terms and that provide their contexts. This book concentrates its attention on making accessiblw what these three theorists have written, rather than offering a synthetin abstraction of the fashionable terminology of theory.

In addition to these detailed readings Michael Payne examines and introduces the manifestos of each writer, their "readings" of paintings, and provides a systematic response to their critics.