The Ring and the Book, Robert Browning - L. M. Findlay (essay date winter 1991)
L. M. Findlay (essay date winter 1991)
SOURCE: Findlay, L. M. “Taking the Measure of Différance: Deconstruction and The Ring and the Book.” Victorian Poetry 29, no. 4 (winter 1991): 401-14.
[In the following essay, Findlay conducts a deconstructive reading of The Ring and the Book.]
In the 1990s, when the reception of deconstruction has moved beyond the extremes of zealotry and hostility that marked its early career in North America, there is a continuing need to register indebtedness to its principal proponents in a careful, reasoned, yet critical way. In this essay I hope to contribute to this process by testing several contentions associated with the Derridean coinage, différance, against the experience of reading Robert Browning's The Ring and the Book (1868-69). Recently, other critics have made similar attempts, reading the poem as a “decentered struggle of interpretations”; as “a nesting...
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