Barbara Ellen Johnson (October 4, 1947 – August 27, 2009) was an American literary critic and translator, born in Boston. She was a Professor of English and Comparative Literature and the Fredric Wertham Professor of Law and Psychiatry in Society at Harvard University. Her scholarship incorporated a variety of structuralism and poststructuralist perspectives—including deconstruction, Jacques Lacan psychoanalysis, and feminist theory—into a critical, interdisciplinary study of literature. As a scholar, teacher, and translator, Johnson helped make the theories of French philosopher Jacques Derrida accessible to English-speaking audiences in the United States at a time when they had just begun to gain recognition in France. Accordingly, she is often associated with the "Yale school" of academic literary criticism.
Early life
Barbara Johnson was born in Boston, Massachusetts, the only daughter of Gilbert and Priscilla (James) Johnson. She graduated from Westwood High School in 1965, attended
Oberlin College from 1965 to 1969, and completed a Ph.D. in French at
Yale University in 1977.
Her graduate studies occurred during the emergence of the "
Yale school," a group of
literary critics that included Johnson's thesis director, Paul de Man. The Yale School's characteristic integration of
structuralism and poststructuralist
theory into the study of
literature became an essential feature of Johnson's approach to
criticism.
She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1985 for French Literature.
Overview of major works
In her 1990 essay, "Writing" (in
Critical Terms for Literary Study), Johnson outlines the importance of
theory to analyses of
literature. She argues that the
history of writing (
l'écriture) is an important
philosophical,
political, and
psychoanalytical concept in twentieth-century French thought. She posits French theorist
Roland Barthes' appropriation of Ferdinand de Saussure's concept of the sign—encompassing both a "signifier" and a "signified"—as the foundation of his theory that language is a "structure," a system of relations governed by a set of rules. Johnson then goes on to describe the central roles played by
Jacques Derrida and
psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan in destabilizing
Roland Barthes' account of the relation between signifier and signified and the "structure" of
language. Following Derrida, Johnson argues that reading is not the task of grasping the true single meaning of a
textuality, but of grasping its multiple meanings, which are often unstable and contradictory. This
polysemy has allowed
feminist and marginalized readers to enter texts at the locations where the author tries to "dominate, erase, or distort" the various "other" claims that are made through language and reassert their identities.
The Critical Difference
In
The Critical Difference (1980), Johnson argues that any model of difference as a polarized difference "between entities (
prose and
poetry, man and woman,
literature and
theory, guilt and innocence)" is necessarily founded upon "a repression of differences within entities" (pp. x-xi). In this book, Johnson explores how the unknown and the unknowable function in a text. The "unknown" to which she refers is not something concealed or distant, but a fundamental unknowability that constitutes and underlies our linguistic cognition.
In one of the articles in The Critical Difference, "Melville's Fist: The Execution of Billy Budd," Johnson reads Herman Melville's novel as a performance of the irreconcilability between the "signifier" and the "signified." She argues that if a description could perfectly describe its referent and actually "hit" its intended object (just as Billy Budd hits and kills John Claggart), the result would be the annihilation of that object. Language, thus, can only function upon imperfection, instability, and unknowability.
A World of Difference and The Feminist Difference
Johnson's next book,
A World of Difference (1987), reflects a move away from the strictly canonical context of her analyses in
The Critical Difference. Johnson wants to take her investigation beyond "the white male Euro-American literary, philosophical, psychoanalytical, and critical canon" that dominates the
academy as a whole and her work in particular.
But she also calls the "sameness" of that white Euro-American literary and critical tradition into question, undertaking a thorough interrogation of its boundaries. In addition, Johnson expands the scope of her literary subjects to include black and/or women writers, such as Zora Neale Hurston, Dorothy Dinnerstein, James Weldon Johnson, and
Adrienne Rich. Her subsequent collection,
The Feminist Difference (1998), offers a continued critique of the terms in play throughout
feminism's history and an examination of the differences within and between feminisms.
The Wake of Deconstruction
The Wake of Deconstruction (1994) approaches the general state of
deconstruction in light of the backlash it faced over the course of the 1980s and early '90s. Through the double lenses of Paul de Man's posthumous
Nazi collaboration scandal and the academic community's reaction to the murder of
feminist legal
theorist Mary Joe Frug, Johnson discusses
allegory,
feminism, and the misinterpretation of
deconstruction.
The problematics of language
The question of translation
In "Taking Fidelity Philosophically" (in
Difference in Translation), Johnson describes
translation as an ultimately impossible endeavor because the "mother" or original language is already, intrinsically untranslatable from signifier to signified. The more one attempts to translate a work into comprehensibility, the more likely one is to stray from its original ambiguity.
Jacques Derrida, with his thoughts on différance, elucidates the complicating but necessary fact of language: that it is foreign to itself. Every attempt to translate sets the language against itself, creating new tensions as it progresses.
Translation, though impossible, is also necessary, as it is precisely these tensions that constitute language.
Deconstruction, indeterminacy, and politics
Throughout her work, Johnson emphasizes both the difficulty of applying
deconstruction to political action and of separating linguistic contradictions, complexities, and
polysemy from political questions. In
A World of Difference, she makes a turn to a "real world," but one which is always left in quotation marks—"real," but nonetheless inseparable from its textual, written aspect. In a chapter of the book entitled, "Is Writerliness Conservative?" Johnson examines the political implications of "undecidability" in writing, as well as the consequences of labeling the
poetic and the undecidable as
politically inert. She writes that, if "poetry makes nothing happen," poetry also "makes
nothing happen"—the limits of the political are themselves fraught with political implications.
writes in his introduction to
The Wake of Deconstruction that "if interpretive closure always violates textual indeterminacy, if authority is perhaps fundamentally non-textual, reducing to identity what should remain different, Johnson's work could best be summarized as an attempt to delay the inevitable reductionist desire for meaning".
Prosopopoeia and anthropomorphism
In "Apostrophe, Animation, and Abortion" (in
A World of Difference) and "Anthropomorphism in Lyric and Law" (in
Persons and Things), Johnson discusses the recurrence of rhetorical figures of
prosopopoeia (an address to a dead or absent person) and
anthropomorphism (conferring human attributes on a nonhuman entity) within contemporary disputes about
abortion, corporate personhood, and other debates surrounding who or what qualifies as a person. "Apostrophe" juxtaposes Romantic poets such as Percy Bysshe Shelley with twentieth-century poems by
Gwendolyn Brooks,
Lucille Clifton, and
Adrienne Rich that deal with women's experiences following abortion. Johnson argues that the analogy between creative writing and giving
birth, traditionally employed by male poets like
Philip Sidney and
Ben Jonson, re-appears in a distorted fashion in women's writing. Johnson's concern with prosopopoeia represents an ongoing elaboration of Paul de Man's work, extending the problems posed in his essays "Autobiography as De-Facement" and "Anthropomorphism and Trope in Lyric" (in
The Rhetoric of Romanticism) to feminist and African-American literature.
Death
Johnson was diagnosed with cerebellar ataxia in 2001. She continued to write and advise graduate students until her death in 2009.
Publications
Selected works
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Persons and Things (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008)
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Mother Tongues: Sexuality, Trials, Motherhood, Translation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003)
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"Using People: Immanuel Kant with Donald Winnicott," in The Turn to Ethics, ed. Marjorie Garber, Beatrice Hanssen, and Rebecca L. Walkowitz (New York: Routledge, 2000) (reprinted in Persons and Things)
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"Anthropomorphism in Lyric and Law," in the Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities, 10 Yale J.L. & Human. 549 (Summer 1998) (reprinted in Persons and Things)
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"Moses and Intertextuality: Sigmund Freud, Zora Neale Hurston, and the Bible," in Poetics of the Americas, ed. Bainard Cowan and Jefferson Humphries (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997)
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The Feminist Difference: Literature, Psychoanalysis, Race and Gender (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998)
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The Wake of Deconstruction (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994)
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"Writing," in Critical Terms for Literary Study, ed. Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990)
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A World of Difference (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987)
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"Taking Fidelity Philosophically," in Difference in Translation, ed. Joseph F. Graham (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985)
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The Critical Difference: Essays in the Contemporary Rhetoric of Reading (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980)
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Défigurations du langage poétique: La seconde révolution baudelairienne (Paris: Flammarion, 1979)
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"The Frame of Reference: Poe, Lacan, Derrida," in Yale French Studies, no. 55/56 (1977): pp. 457–505 (reprinted in The Purloined Poe, 1988)
Edited volumes and projects
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The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, Principal ed., Vincent B. Leitch, with William E. Cain, Laurie A. Finke, John McGowan, and Jeffery J. Williams (New York: Norton, 2001)
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Freedom and Interpretation: The Oxford Amnesty Lectures, 1992 (New York: Basic Books, 1993)
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Consequences of Theory: Selected Papers from the English Institute, 1987-1988, ed. with Jonathan Arac (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990)
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A New History of French Literature, Principal ed., Dennis Hollier (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989)
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Yale French Studies, No. 63, "The Pedagogical Imperative: Teaching as a Literary Genre" (1982)
Translations
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Stéphane Mallarmé, Divagations (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007)
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Jacques Derrida, Dissemination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981)
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Philippe Sollers, "Freud's Hand," in Yale French Studies, No. 55-56 (1979)
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Jacques Derrida, "Fors: The Anglish Words of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok," in the Georgia Review, No. 31 (1977)
See also
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List of deconstructionists
External links
