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Barbara Johnson

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 structuralist and poststructuralist perspectives—including deconstruction, Lacanian 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.

For the Irish Olympic hurdler, see Barbara Johnson (athlete). For 1991 Miss Turks and Caicos, see Miss Turks and Caicos.

Early life[edit]

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.[1] 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 structuralist 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.[2]

The problematics of language[edit]

The question of translation[edit]

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[edit]

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.[4] Harold Schweizer 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".[5]

Prosopopoeia and anthropomorphism[edit]

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 Sidney and 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[edit]

Johnson was diagnosed with cerebellar ataxia in 2001. She continued to write and advise graduate students until her death in 2009.[6]

Persons and Things (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008)

Mother Tongues: Sexuality, Trials, Motherhood, Translation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003)

"Using People: with Winnicott," in The Turn to Ethics, ed. Marjorie Garber, Beatrice Hanssen, and Rebecca L. Walkowitz (New York: Routledge, 2000) (reprinted in Persons and Things)

Kant

" 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)

Anthropomorphism

" 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)

Moses

The Feminist Difference: Literature, , Race and Gender (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998)

Psychoanalysis

The Wake of Deconstruction (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994)

"Writing," in Critical Terms for Literary Study, ed. and Thomas McLaughlin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990)

Frank Lentricchia

A World of Difference (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987)

"Taking Fidelity Philosophically," in Difference in Translation, ed. Joseph F. Graham (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985)

The Critical Difference: Essays in the Contemporary of Reading (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980)

Rhetoric

Défigurations du langage poétique: La seconde révolution baudelairienne (Paris: Flammarion, 1979)

"The Frame of Reference: Poe, Lacan, Derrida," in Yale French Studies, no. 55/56 (1977): pp. 457–505 (reprinted in The Purloined Poe, 1988)

List of deconstructionists

at the Harvard University Press Blog.

Barbara Johnson remembered

The Harvard Crimson.

Literary luminary passes away

a special issue of Differences (2007)

Difference: Reading with Barbara Johnson

Barbara Johnson's memorial service

[1]

Pembroke Center Archives, Brown University

Barbara Johnson Papers