Joyce Effects is a collection of essays by a leading commentator on James Joyce. Joyce's books, Derek Attridge argues, go off like fireworks, and one of this book's aims is to enhance the reader's enjoyment of these special effects. He examines the way Joyce's writing challenges and transforms our understanding of language, literature, and history and offers in-depth analysis of Joyce's major works. This collection represents fifteen years of close engagement with Joyce by Derek Attridge and reflects the changing course of Joyce criticism during this period.

J.M. Coetzee's latest novel, The Schooldays of Jesus, is now available from Viking. Late Essays: 2006-2016 will be available January 2018.
In addition to being one of the most acclaimed and accomplished fiction writers in the world, Nobel Prize winner J. M. Coetzee is also a literary critic of the highest caliber. In this collection of twenty essays, Coetzee examines the work of some of the twentieth-century's greatest writers--from Samuel Beckett and Gunter Grass to Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Philip Roth. Brilliantly insightful, challenging yet accessible,...

Examines Sidney's statement that quantitative verse on the Latin model is more suitable than the accentual verse of the English tradition during the Renaissance.

What is the importance of deconstruction, and the writing of Jacques Derrida in particular, for literary criticism today? Derek Attridge argues that the challenge of Derrida's work for our understanding of literature and its value has still not been fully met, and in this book, which traces a close engagement with Derrida's writing over two decades and reflects an interest in that work going back a further two decades, shows how that work can illuminate a variety of topics.Chapters include an overview of deconstruction as a critical practice today, discussions of the secret, postcolonialism,...

What is the importance of deconstruction, and the writing of Jacques Derrida in particular, for literary criticism today? Derek Attridge argues that the challenge of Derrida's work for our understanding of literature and its value has still not been fully met, and in this book, which traces a close engagement with Derrida's writing over two decades and reflects an interest in that work going back a further two decades, shows how that work can illuminate a variety of topics.Chapters include an overview of deconstruction as a critical practice today, discussions of the secret, postcolonialism,...

The contemporary reader of English poetry is able to take pleasure in the sounds and movements of the English language in works written over the past eight centuries, and to find poems that convey powerful emotions and vivid images from this entire period. This book investigates the ways in which poets have exploited the resources of the language as a spoken medium--its characteristic rhythms, its phonetic qualities, its deployment of syntax--to write verse that continues to move and delight. The chapters in the first of the two parts examine a number of issues relating to poetic form: the...

What is distinctive about the cultural practice called 'literature'? How does it benefit individuals and society? How do literary works retain their importance and their capacity to give pleasure over decades and centuries? What constitutes responsible criticism? These are some of the questions addressed in this book, which develops the arguments put forward in Derek Attridge's influential study The Singularity of Literature (2004). Beginning with an extended cross-examination in the form of an interview addressing a range of topics relating to the work of literature (understood both...

This volume of conversation not only provides a succinct philosophical biography that highlights the wide range of Attridge's interests, but also foregrounds his energetic engagements with literary theory, poetics, and stylistics, as well as his reassessments of contemporary philosophy and literary ideas, specifically those pertaining to the work Jacques Derrida, James Joyce, and J. M. Coetzee. Readers will find in this book a wonderful balancing act as Attridge negotiates the dynamics between the orthodoxies of critical practice and the strategic interventions of deconstructive reading. This...