Peggy Kamuf's Books

Literature and the Remains of the Death Penalty

By: Peggy Kamuf

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

Literature and the Remains of the Death Penalty

By: Peggy Kamuf

Why have generations of philosophers failed or refused to articulate a rigorous challenge to the death penalty, when literature has been rife with death penalty abolitionism for centuries? In this book, Peggy Kamuf explores why any properly philosophical critique of capital punishment in the West must confront the literary as that which exceeds the logical demands of philosophy. Jacques Derrida has written that “the modern history of the institution named literature in Europe over the last three or four centuries is contemporary with and indissociable from a contestation of the death penalty.” How, Kamuf asks, does literature contest the death penalty today, particularly in the United States where it remains the last of its kind in a Western nation that professes to be a democracy? What resources do fiction, narrative, and poetic language supply in the age of the remains of the death penalty? Following a lucid account of Derrida’s approach to the death penalty, Kamuf pursues this question across several literary texts. In reading Orwell’s story “A Hanging,” Kamuf explores the relation between literary narration and the role of the witness, concluding that such a witness needs the seal of literary language in order to account for the secret of the death penalty. The next chapter turns to the American scene with Robert Coover’s 1977 novel The Public Burning, which restages the executions of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg as an outlandish public spectacle in Times Square. Because this fictional device reverses the drive toward secrecy that, beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, put an end to public executions in the West, Kamuf reads the novel in a tension with the current tendency in the U.S. to shore up and protect remaining death penalty practices through increasingly pervasive secrecy measures. A reading of Norman Mailer’s 1979 novel The Executioner’s Song, shows the breakdown of any firm distinction between suicide and capital execution and explores the essential affinity between traditional narrative structure, which is plotted from the end, and the “plot” of a death penalty. Final readings of Kafka, Derrida, and Baudelaire consider the relation between literature and law, showing how performative literary language can “play the law. “A brief conclusion, titled “Postmortem,” reflects on the condition of literature as that which survives the death penalty. A major contribution to the field of law and society, this book makes the case for literature as a space for contesting the death penalty, a case that scholars and activists working across a range of traditions will need to confront.

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

179

Publisher

Fordham Univ Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0823282317

ISBN 13

9780823282319

To Follow

By: Peggy Kamuf

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

To Follow

By: Peggy Kamuf

This book collects ten years of Peggy Kamuf's writing on the work and friendship of Jacques Derrida. The majority of the chapters discuss a key aspect of Derrida's thought, either from a single work or across several texts. Kamuf engages with a broad arra

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

199

Publisher

Edinburgh University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0748655115

ISBN 13

9780748655113

Literature and the Remains of the Death Penalty

By: Peggy Kamuf

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

Literature and the Remains of the Death Penalty

By: Peggy Kamuf

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

179

Publisher

Fordham Univ Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0823282317

ISBN 13

9780823282319

To Follow

By: Peggy Kamuf

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

To Follow

By: Peggy Kamuf

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

199

Publisher

Edinburgh University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0748655115

ISBN 13

9780748655113

Book of Addresses

By: Peggy Kamuf

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

Book of Addresses

By: Peggy Kamuf

This book consists of a series of essays that all turn around questions of the address of speech or writing. They argue and demonstrate that meaning is not just a matter of the active intention of a subject (for example, speaker, writer, or other signatory of a meaningful act) but also of its reception at another's address. The book's main concern is therefore with a theory of meaning and of action that is not centered on the intentional, self-conscious subject. The fifteen chapters explore this problematic within three broad areas: love, jealousy, and sexual difference; fiction or literature; and political or public discourse. The book engages principally with contemporary French thought and includes important new readings of work by Jacques Derrida, Hélène Cixous, Maurice Blanchot, and Jean-Luc Nancy.

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

386

Publisher

Stanford University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0804750599

ISBN 13

9780804750592

Signature Pieces

On the Institution of Authorship

By: Peggy Kamuf

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

Signature Pieces

On the Institution of Authorship

By: Peggy Kamuf

No detailed description available for "Signature Pieces".

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

252

Publisher

Cornell University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1501726358

ISBN 13

9781501726354

The Division of Literature

Or the University in Deconstruction

By: Peggy Kamuf

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

The Division of Literature

Or the University in Deconstruction

By: Peggy Kamuf

These questions guide Peggy Kamuf's analysis of the complex history of literary study in the modern university and orient her critical reading of developments from the French Revolution through the nineteenth century and beyond in Europe. She then turns to one of the most troubling works in the American literary canon - Melville's The Confidence-Man - to show how academic literary history has avoided confronting the implications of works in which meaning is never solely confined within a past.

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

272

Publisher

University of Chicago Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0226423247

ISBN 13

9780226423241

Signature Pieces

On the Institution of Authorship

By: Peggy Kamuf

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

Signature Pieces

On the Institution of Authorship

By: Peggy Kamuf

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.

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

268

Publisher

Cornell University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1501726374

ISBN 13

9781501726378

The Division of Literature

Or the University in Deconstruction

By: Peggy Kamuf

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

The Division of Literature

Or the University in Deconstruction

By: Peggy Kamuf

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

280

Publisher

University of Chicago Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0226423239

ISBN 13

9780226423234

Book of Addresses

By: Peggy Kamuf

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

Book of Addresses

By: Peggy Kamuf

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

386

Publisher

Stanford University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0804750599

ISBN 13

9780804750592

Book's by Peggy Kamuf

Literature and the Remains of the Death Penalty

Literature and the Remains of the Death Penalty

To Follow

To Follow

Literature and the Remains of the Death Penalty

Literature and the Remains of the Death Penalty

To Follow

To Follow

Book of Addresses

Book of Addresses

Signature Pieces

Signature Pieces

The Division of Literature

The Division of Literature

Signature Pieces

Signature Pieces

The Division of Literature

The Division of Literature

Book of Addresses

Book of Addresses

Username

Password

Username

Password

Password again

Birthday

Email