Preface 1. See in particular Paul de Man’s “Rhetoric of Temporality” (Blindness 187–228). 2. See Vincent B. Leitch’s discussion of Derrida’s midcareer interest in the “assault on the institution of style” (25–37). Chapter 1. The Narrative Turn 1. On narrative in the “linguistic turn” see Richard T. Vann. 2. See Janice Carlisle for a helpful overview of the emergence of narrative as a concept in contemporary criticism, especially as coupled to culture as a way to talk about traditional appeals to coherence and control. 3. In this sense, this project is not an attempt to revisit narrative concepts in the light of deconstruction. Such a task has been handled well in books by Andrew Gibson (Towards) and Mark Currie. Instead, this book examines narrative as a broad theoretical model for thinking about writing and criticism. 4. On the importance of narrative’s poles of enunciation in language games, see Alex Segal. 5. Bill Readings describes a similar tension between mutually necessary but heterogeneous discursive systems in Jean-François Lyotard ’s first major work, Discours, figure: In insisting that through reference language encounters “the depth of the visible,” Lyotard does not argue against de Saussure that things have a real pre-linguistic meaning. Rather, the capacity of language to point, to refer, to notes . 172 Notes . 173 indicate, is not itself a matter of meaning. Pointing, the referential or indicative function, is both necessary to and disruptive of signification. That is to say, it is figural. Reference does not introduce language to a reality that cannot be signified; rather reference and deixis as linguistic functions of pointing cannot be reduced to signification because they introduce to the functioning of language a difference which cannot be reduced to oppositionality . (14; citing Lyotard, Discours 27) 6. On this shift as applied specifically to issues of plot, see Ruth Ronen (“Paradigm”). Chapter 2. Deconstruction and the Worldly Text 1. On the importance of such spatial language, see Kathleen M. Kirby. 2. Often the claim that deconstruction has no relation to, or interest in, the outside world is based on a misinterpretation of Jacques Derrida ’s famous claim that there is nothing outside of the text (il n’y a pas de hors-texte). For a discussion of this misreading and the context of Derrida’s comment, see Jeffrey T. Nealon (57). 3. Gregory Ulmer’s emphasis on Derridian allegory appears explicitly in “The Object of Post-Criticism.” 4. In The Use of Pleasure, for example, Michel Foucault describes how individuals participate in discursive structures to “transform themselves , to change themselves in their singular being, and to make their life into an oeuvre that carries certain aesthetic values and meets certain stylistic criteria” (10–11). This image of individuals participating within the construction of being has offered many critics an alternative to Foucault’s earlier theory of power’s “inscription” of individual bodies. 5. Actually, one might argue that the same is true of Foucault’s later work. Gilles Deleuze argues that Foucault’s idea of space undergoes a fundamental change: “For a long time Foucault thought of the outside as being an ultimate spatiality that was deeper than time; but in his late works he offers the possibility once more of putting time on the outside as being time, conditioned by the fold” (Foucault 108). Deleuze’s theory of the “folding” of space in Foucault’s last work echoes the spatial multiplicity that I have described in Derrida. 6. In fact, at one point in Specters, Derrida mentions “Ousia and Grammē” as an essay that examines the temporality of “spectralizing” and the creation of the “‘non-sensuous’ thing” (155). [44.210.78.150] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 07:04 GMT) Chapter 3. The Search for Form in American Postmodern Fiction 1. Raymond Federman, for example, notes, “A friend of mine once described my books to me in a letter as long tenor sax solos. The language of my novels just goes on and on, improvising as it goes along, hitting wrong notes all the time—but, after all, jazz also built itself on a system of wrong chords that the player stumbles upon and then builds from” (LeClair and McCaffery 131). Reed discusses jazz in his interview with John O’Brien (Bellamy 131). 2. Typical of the degree to which American postmodernist writers embrace such principles is Ronald Sukenick’s interview comments about character: “What’s happening actually is that I’m making up my character. I...