Deconstruction, as a critical theory, maintains that language is a system of signs and, more precisely, a system of oppositions, differences and contradictions. Accordingly, the theory is operative in the sense that meanings are ultimately, unstable, and that a text, any text, contradicts, dismantles and even destroys itself. Hence, literary texts…

Argues for the canonicity of "Sonnet: The Token," a John Donne poem whose authorship has been in doubt for some decades. Employs deconstruction as its critical approach, though that approach is nearly passe in Renaissance studies, and it calls the issue of authorship into question. (TB)

When Vladimir Nabokov was up for a chair in literature at Harvard, the linguist Roman Jakobson protested: "What's next? Shall we appoint elephants to teach zoology?" That anecdote, with which D. G. Myers begins "The Elephants Teach", perfectly frames the issues this book tackles. Myers explores more than a century of debate over how writing should…

The "ISSS Annual Conference Proceedings" is a peer-reviewed professional publication published once a year following the annual conference. (Individual papers contain references.) [For the 2009 proceedings, see ED504973.]