Glas - Tapa dura

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."

Derrida authorized this translation by John P. Leavey, Jr., and Richard Rand. Leavey, who teaches at the University of Florida, has also translated Derrida's Edmund Husserl's "Origin of Geometry: An Introduction" (available in paperback from theUniversity of Nebraska Press) and is the author of "Glassary" (1986), a companion volume to "Glas" published by the University of Nebraska Press. Rand, who teaches at the University of Alabama, has translated Derrida's "Signsponge" (1984)."