Univerzitet u dekonstrukciji ili Podela književnosti
The Division of Literature or the University in Deconstruction

Author(s): Peggy Kamuf
Contributor(s): Branka Arsić (Translator)
Subject(s): Philosophy, Language and Literature Studies, Studies of Literature, Aesthetics, Contemporary Philosophy, Structuralism and Post-Structuralism, Philosophy of Language
Published by: Beogradski krug
Keywords: deconstruction; literary theory; literature; politics of language; university; Melville; humanities; method of history; Derrida; art
Summary/Abstract: The inclusion of literary study is a distinctive trait of the modern, scientific university. But this legitimation of a ¨division of literature¨ has been from the beginning a tenuous, ambivalent, and divisive affair. Why and what effect? These questions guide Peggy Kamuf's analysis of the complex history of literary study in the modern university and orient her critical reading of developments from the French Revolution through the nineteenth century and beyond in Europe. She then turns to one of the most troubling works in the American literary canon – Melville's The Confindence- Men – to show academic literary history has avoided confronting the implications of works in which meaning is never solely confined within a past. By enganging a future readership to which it applies for credit, Kamuf argues, literature cannot serve as a stable object of study. It locates, rather, a site of ¨the university in deconstruction¨.

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