Glas (book) - Critical Response

Critical Response

Glas is described as experimental and obscure. Literary theorist Geoffrey Hartman considered the text's playfulness "exhilarating to many within the discipline ", acknowledging that to others it "may prove a disadvantage". Morris Dickstein, writing for The New York Sun, called it "a dizzying commentary on the work of Hegel and Genet".

According to Jane Marie Todd, Glas is a study of literary genre, and its seeming defiance of genre "allows this curious and challenging text a direct contribution to literary theory: in both form and subject matter, it details a new way of viewing genre definitions." Derrida himself described the text as "a sort of a wake," in reference to James Joyce's Finnegans Wake; Alan Roughley argues,

It is clear that his reading of Joyce's text haunts the way in which Derrida has constructed his exploration of Hegel and Genet by positioning separate and discrete textual columns next to each other so that it is necessary to read intertextually and follow the ways in which the textual play operates across and between the margins or borders of the page(s) and space(s) separating the columns.

John Sturrock, reviewing the English translation of Glas for The New York Times, commented that "as a piece of writing it has no known genre". In his estimation reading the book is "a scandalously random experience" given the problem of how to read the two printed columns—consecutively or alternately from section to section. Though it is an "exuberantly clever, punning text", it "asks too much of one's patience and intelligence; our defense against a text declaring itself to be unreadable may be to call its author's bluff and simply leave it unread." Sturrock praises the English translation (by Richard Rand and John P. Leavey Jr.), but notes that a text such as Glas by definition cannot be translated and that Glas in English "mocks . . . the notion that translation achieves a semantic identity from one language to another." Sturrock's review was severely criticized in two responses: one writer reprimanded Sturrock for a "dismissive account", another pointed out that what Sturrock refers to as a "random experience" (of the text's format) is in fact reminiscent of the "sacred texts of Judaism".

The English translation was praised by Ned Lukacher in Modern Language Notes as an "almost absolutely singular and exemplary achievement".