Christopher Norris

Christopher Norris a lecturer in English at the University of Wales Institute of Science and Technology, is the author of a study of William Empson and of Deconstruction: Theory and Practice.

Letter

Leavis and Norris

21 April 1983

SIR: I am sorry to have misremembered the title of Leavis’s essay on Othello. Henceforth I shall emulate Mr Dodsworth (Letters, 16 June) and keep the Master’s works always ready to hand, lest further heresies blacken my name. Meanwhile I fail to see how the substance of my argument is affected by such a trivial lapse. Mr Dodsworth will hardly need directing to the numerous essays where Leavis develops...

Mortal Scripts

Christopher Norris, 21 April 1983

In the present climate of polemical exchange one may doubt whether Gabriel Josipovici would take very kindly to being enlisted on the side of ‘literary theory’. Though his essays make reference to figures like Barthes and Derrida, they do so with an air of studied detachment, as if to forestall any charge of deeper complicity. If it comes to a straight choice between ‘interpretation’ and ‘theory’ – however unreal the terms of that choice – Josipovici is in the business of interpreting texts, and only has time for theoretical diversions when they happen to point up a reading or adorn a theme. Yet it is fair to remark that these essays (based on his Northcliffe Lectures for 1980-81, delivered at University College, London) could scarcely have taken their present form had it not been for Josipovici’s involvement with recent literary theory. Indeed, it is one of the merits of this book that it moves between ‘theory’ and ‘interpretation’ with an unforced naturalness which helps to discredit that false and misleading dichotomy.–

Letter

Wild, Fierce Yale

21 October 1982

SIR: Professor Earl Miner (Letters, 10 January) defends Jonathan Culler against what he sees as a needlessly ad hominem attack in my book Deconstruction: Theory and Practice. I have to protest that Culler is not cast as ‘villain’ of the piece, or as a ‘traitor within the gates’ of recent literary theory. My book treats his Structuralist Poetics as an exemplary case of those conceptual problems...
Letter

Faculty at War

17 June 1982

SIR: As a ‘New Accents’author I should be glad to know which books exactly are supposed to be the targets of Gabriel Josipovici’s blanket fire. It is a strangely warped high-mindedness which denounces Methuen for trading on the ‘series’ image an then proceeds to attack the whole lot under cover c evasive generalities.Of course it must be annoying to have his colleagues quoting ‘Hawkes (or...

Return of the real

A.D. Nuttall, 23 April 1992

The idea has got around – among ‘advanced’ thinkers of various political persuasions – that realist epistemologies are a thing of the past, that truth values in criticism...

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Theory and Truth

Frank Kermode, 21 November 1991

The autumn catalogues of some very enterprising publishers announce as many books as usual under the rubric Literary Criticism, or possibly more, but few have titles of a sort that, even ten...

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Paul de Man’s Abyss

Frank Kermode, 16 March 1989

Paul de Man was born in 1919 to a high-bourgeois Antwerp family, Flemish but sympathetic to French language and culture. He studied at the Free University of Brussels, where he wrote some pieces...

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Sabotage

John Sturrock, 31 March 1988

Bait them and the Derrideans certainly rise. When the English version of Derrida’s Glas appeared last year in the United States*, I wrote a griping review of it, to regret mainly that a...

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Untheory

Alexander Nehamas, 22 May 1986

The ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry which Plato described, and in which he took part, is still being fought. Poetry today has become, more generally, ‘rhetoric’,...

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Plain English

Denis Donoghue, 20 December 1984

Orwell took little care of his manuscripts. He didn’t anticipate that collectors of such things would pay real money for them, and that universities would think it a privilege to turn a...

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Textual Harassment

Claude Rawson, 5 April 1984

In a recent review in this paper, Edward Said used the word ‘narrative’ about thirty times. This might have seemed a lot even in the present state of litcritspeak, and even in an...

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Wild, Fierce Yale

Geoffrey Hartman, 21 October 1982

There are no Departments of Literary Criticism; and even proposals to have a Criticism question in official examinations can cause turbulence in academic circles. What is at stake? By now, of...

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