Jay Williams – författare

London's first-hand engagement with the world--the process of becoming and maintaining himself as a citizen of the world--helps define the kind of writing he produced. It is insufficient now to call him a naturalist writer if his principal concern was to reflect and represent, not the usual fare of violence and natural forces that we as literary theorists have used to periodize London's work, but rather something larger, more indeterminant, contemporary. The word modern appears often in the pages of this handbook, and though it is not new to call London a modernist, the sheer weight of the scholarship in this present volume that attests to this alternative designation gives it a thorough grounding that previous attempts lacked. London called his times the Machine Age, not just to underscore the rapidity of modern life and its new mechanization, but also to highlight the need for a new social and economic order. The purpose of this handbook is to honor him as a representative American writer of the age as he understood it.

Throughout his long career, Jacques Derrida had a close, collaborative relationship with "Critical Inquiry" and its editors. He saved some of his most important essays for the journal, and he relished the ensuing arguments and polemics that stemmed from the responses to his writing that "Critical Inquiry" encouraged. Collecting the best of Derrida's work that was published in the journal between 1980 and 2002, "Signature Derrida" provides a remarkable introduction to the philosopher and the evolution of his thought. These essays define three significant "periods" in Derrida's writing: his early, seemingly revolutionary phase; a middle stage, often autobiographical, that included spirited defense of his work; and his late period, when his persona as a public intellectual was prominent, and he wrote on topics such as animals and religion. The first period is represented by essays like "The Law of Genre," in which Derrida produces a kind of phenomenological narratology.Another essay, "The Linguistic Circle of Geneva," embodies the second, presenting deconstructionism at its best: Derrida shows that what was imagined to be an epistemological break in the study of linguistics was actually a repetition of earlier concepts. The final period of Derrida's writing includes the essays "Of Spirit" and "The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow)" and eulogies for Michel Foucault, Louis Marin, and Emmanuel Levinas, in which Derrida uses the ideas of each thinker to push forward the implications of their theories. Gathering a small but crucial portion of the oeuvre of this singular philosopher, "Signature Derrida" is the most wide-ranging, and thus most representative, anthology of Derrida's work to date.