The Barbara Johnson Reader

“Johnson’s real gift was to tackle the ‘dead white males’ of the canon and re-read them, looking for the women, ever alert to what she called ‘muteness envy’ in canonical poetry. She directed her attention to popular works, too, to films such as Thelma and Louise and The Piano, happy to bring Keats into the discussion as she did so. Such essays stress critical and creative vitality in the midst of death, and are still life-giving today, still radical, angry and passionate, yet always disciplined. Johnson asks acute questions, inserts the personal into her academic essays, and gives us new ideas about ‘how to read.’”

- Lesley McDowell (TLS)

“Reading these essays, one finds them as sprightly, brilliant, and revelatory as ever. Johnson’s style-famous for the clarity that paradoxically masks and illuminates the argumentative complexity of the writing-is brisk, orderly, and economical. … Perhaps this is the moment to return to the intellectual upheaval of deconstruction, that almost forgotten art of reading and rereading. There is no better place to begin rereading than right here, with Barbara Johnson’s own startling and writerly prose.”

- Judith Brown (Modernism/modernity)

“Essays on abortion, corporate personhood, and many other still contemporary issues show that, for Johnson, deconstruction was always deeply intertwined with lived political reality, and many of the best essays in the collection bridge the gap between readings of poems and analysis of life in various forms of political relation, often in the context of the surprising strangeness of the textual or human encounter. For Johnson, ‘the undecidable is the political. There is politics precisely because there is undecidability. And there is also poetry’ (p.227). The forms of her own essays, intriguing in the turns they take, the conclusions they draw, and the interpretations they bring forth from the texts they examine, highlight and perform this causal relationship in consistently insightful and surprising ways.”

(Forum for Modern Language Studies)