Polemic

by Jane Gallop (Editor)

These new essays by leading scholars examine some famous and less well-known instances of polemical encounters. The essays are enhanced by an interview with Gayatri Spivak, specially conducted by Jane Gallop for this volume

Historically rigorous, theoretically astute, and sometimes wickedly funny, Polemic makes criticism a critical issue.

218 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2004

About the author

Jane Gallop is Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Wisconsin -- Milwaukee, where she has taught since 1990. Before that, she was Herbert S. Autrey Professor of Humanities at Rice University, where she founded the Women's Studies program. At the beginning of her career, she taught in the French Department at Miami University in Ohio (she earned a PhD in French Literature in 1976). She is the author of nine books, and nearly a hundred articles. She has written on a wide range of topics: psychoanalysis, especially the work of Jacques Lacan; French feminism; psychoanalysis and feminism; the Marquis de Sade; feminist literary criticism; pedagogy; sexual harassment; photography; queer theory; close reading. While the topics vary, her writing can be understood as the consistent application of a close reading method to theoretical texts. She has been teaching this close reading of theory to her students for the past 40 years.

Reviews

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

Michael Warner's essay "Uncritical Reading" has a lot of interest for those of us with a foot in the academic humanities. Writes Warner, "Students who come to my literature classes, I find, read in all the ways they aren't supposed to." He goes on to catalog the ways -- and ask exactly what characterizes the reading practice (called "critical") to which all these supposedly false or wrong-headed ways of reading are opposed. Does an opposition of "we critical/you deluded" really serve to describe this collision in a way that is either pedagogically useful or philosophically accurate?