Derek Attridge in Conversation

LITERARY / CULTURAL STUDIES

“This philosophical biography in dialogical form allowed me to retrace the curve of an intellectual progression marked by probity and intelligence, depth and clarity, scholarly precision and cultural curiosity, in a word by ‘integrity’—a virtue that Derek has always exemplified for me. I am reminded of why he has been a model for me and will be for others.”

Jean-Michel Rabaté, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, University of

Pennsylvania; Fellow, American Academy of Arts and Letters

“Derek Attridge is one of the most brilliant and versatile literary thinkers in the Anglophone world.  With interests ranging from prosody to deconstruction, together with groundbreaking critical studies of Joyce and Coetzee, Attridge has inspired colleagues and students across three continents. Derek Attridge in Conversation brings out the highlights of a remarkable career in letters, including Attridge’s revolution in the study of English metrics, his championship of poststructuralism in the hostile climate of British academia, and his recent contributions to the defence of literature and the humanities.  Attridge has never been afraid of controversy, and his willingness to challenge accepted wisdom, along with his restless intellectual curiosity, has greatly expanded the scope and possibilities of literary studies. These conversations offer to a wider audience the qualities that make Derek Attridge a major intellectual, a generous teacher, and a wonderful friend.

Maud Ellmann, Berlin Professor of English, University of Chicago

“‘Cool’ is the word that best describes my old friend Derek Attridge and his work. I mean ‘cool’ in the complex vernacular sense, that is, as Alan Liu defines the word in The Laws of Cool. Derek Attridge in Conversation is another cool book. It is a fascinating and generously detailed autobiographical account of Attridge’s intellectual life, prompted by adroit and challenging questions from David Jonathan Y. Bayot and Francisco Roman Guevara. Attridge is one of the most distinguished literary theorists in the world. Though he has amazing command of work by theoreticians of all sorts, his work has especially centered on Western prosody and on other questions of literary form, on the definition of literature or ‘literariness,’ on Jacques Derrida’s work, and on Joyce. This new book tells, with appropriate cool, the moving story of how a white middle-class person who grew up in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa, under Apartheid, came to write a whole series of major books, to hold distinguished chairs in English and American universities, to lecture all over the world, and to have expert knowledge, often by personal acquaintance, with just about any important theorist you can name. Among its other virtues, this admirably readable book is a marvelously cool, in the sense of fair-minded, introduction to modern theory. Its autobiographical side also exemplifies how important are chance encounters with people or books, even in the life and work of a highly organized cool customer like Derek Attridge, if someone so ‘singular’ as he can be said to be ‘like’ anyone else.”

J. Hillis Miller, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature and English, University of California, Irvine