Why is it that all interpretations are possible, and none is true? That some interpretations are just, but some are false? Lecercle draws on the resources of pragmatics, literary theory and the philosophy of language to propose a new theory of literary, but also of face-to-face, dialogue that charts the interaction between the five participants in the fields of dialogue and/or interpretation: author, reader, text, language and encyclopaedia. Interpretation is taken through its four stages, from glossing and enigma solving to translation and intervention.

This second edition of Colin MacCabe's James Joyce and the Revolution of the Word reprints a classic critical text on Joyce and adds a wealth of new material which places the text in its political and historical context. The argument links politics and literature, sex and language, to provide an account of Joyce which places him continually in both Irish and European history.

Statutes of Liberty was the first book on The New York School of Poets, and gave an acclaimed account of its key figures: John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, and James Schuyler. This second edition contains up-to-date material on the group and its growing influence on postmodern poetics. A new postscript focuses on the work of Ashbery, currently the most esteemed American poet since Wallace Stevens, and his prolific output in the 1990s, including his 200-page epic poem Flow Chart.

These five philosophical essays are designed to constitute a unified whole, in both their critical and their constructive dimensions. Vincent addresses the crisis of meaning, the repetitiousness of technological processes and mechanisms and the declining sense of the real in political life.

Law and the Unconscious is the first work of the French legal philosopher Pierre Legendre to appear in English. Trained as a lawyer, a historian and a psychoanalyst, the work of Pierre Legendre has consistently confronted law with the teaching and methods of psychoanalysis. The present collection of essays addresses a fascinating and diverse set of themes including the doctrinal regulation of tears, dance and law, the desire for the absolute, the war of texts, and the power of images.

In prose and poetry the selections contained here reveal the personal experiences, feelings and angst of three English writers who lived through World War I.

Since the Romantics culture has been identified with the promise of a complete development of human capacities and, typically, the 'rise of English' has been viewed in terms of the (true or distorted) fulfilment of this promise in the education system. This book presents a sustained and historically informed challenge to that view.

Statutes of Liberty is the first full-length academic study of the New York School of Poets. It contains an introduction to the work of these writers, followed by chapters on the central figures: Frank O'Hara, James Schuyler and John Ashbery. A postscript examines the continuing and changing influence of the New York School. The book is also concerned with deconstruction, a mode of literary analysis with which Ashbery's work in particular has come to be associated by critics in America.

'In the destructive element immerse.' These words from Joseph Conrad's Stein in Lord Jim cast a shadow over twentieth-century literature. At the same time, Freud's bleak prognosis of culture's discontents left a psychoanalysis with a legacy that found one of its most profound realisations in the play-rooms of British child psychoanalysis. In this book, Lyndsey Stonebridge offers a new perspective on the history of our fascination with culture's discontents by returning to British psychoanalysis and second-wave modernism.

This work subjects the fundamental ideas of Derrida, Lacan, Barthes and their followers to an examination and demonstrates the baselessness of post-Saussurean claims about the relations between language, reality and self.