1 - Introduction

Summary

Each of the essays here gathered charts and expands an experience of intense readerly surprise. Beyond any methodological considerations, whatever readability they retain lies in the extent to which that surprise continues to permeate them. At a time when “literary theory” often seems bland in the predictability of its outrages, such interest may constitute sufficient justification for their collective publication, but I would not have assembled these papers were it not for the overriding surprise informing my sense of their global coherence – the macro-shock constituting, as it were, the medium within which they were written. These remarks have been compiled toward its delineation.

In the ten years preceding the decade during which these essays were written, in the course of three books, I had been pursuing a dual project: on the one hand, to write an implicit history of the most fruitful phases of that ongoing meditation on textual interpretation in France which had received the journalistic tag(s) of “structuralism” and/or “post-structuralism;” on the other, to do so in the form of a series of readings of canonical texts of French literature. A first book, A Structural Study of Autobiography, was intent on bringing Lacan's re-evaluation of Freud to English-speaking academia by showing that that re-evaluation, among other things, had precise and important consequences for any reading of so enshrined a masterwork as A la recherche du temps perdu. Revolution and Repetition, which followed in 1977, freed the structuralist model of the ballast constituted by its residual investment in the Freudian category of “castration,” charted the reversals in Laplanche and Derrida through which it was dismantled, and made the case that there could be no better medium for the optimal functioning (or comprehension) of the entire process than the intertextual field formed by the novels of Victor Hugo.