Week 6 Posting

Please post by midnight on Sunday (2/22) your deconstructive (post-structuralist) reading of Keat's sonnet, "To *****."

As we discussed in class, you might look to Derrida's reading of Rousseau or J. Hillis Miller's reading of M.H. Abrams's critical essay for models, but remember: these are readings of critical, or meta-languages and so the goal of Derrida's or Miller's reading is to show how such languages' structuring oppositions (speech/writing, copulation/masturbation, host/parasite) are untenable. The languages of science, philosophy, criticism, and so on (meta-languages in that they purport to speak "about" something) suppress differance where literary language calls attention to it. And so, your reading of Keats might focus on how this poem itself meditates on differance -- what it has to teach us about the writtenness, absence, deferral, difference -- differance -- of all language.