Publisher's description
Jacques Derrida is probably the most famous European philosopher alive
today. The University of Nebraska Press makes available for the first
English translation of his most important work to date, Glas. Its
appearance will assist Derrida's readers pro and con in coming to terms
with a complex and controversial book. Glas extensively reworks the
problems of reading and writing in philosophy and literature; questions the
possibility of linear reading and its consequent notions of theme, author,
narrative, and discursive demonstration; and ingeniously disrupts the
positions of reader and writer in the text. Glas is extraordinary in many
ways, most obviously in its typography. Arranged in two columns, with
inserted sections within these, the book simultaneously discusses Hegel’s
philosophy and Jean Genet’s fiction, and shows how two such seemingly
distinct kinds of criticism can reflect and influence one another. The
customary segregation of philosophy, rhetoric, psychoanalysis, linguistics,
history, and poetics is systematically subverted. In design and content,
the books calls into question “types” of literature (history, philosophy,
literary criticism), the ownership of ideas and styles, the glorification
of literary heroes, and the limits of literary representation.