Barbara Johnson - Overview of Major Works

Overview of Major Works

In her 1990 essay, "Writing" (in Critical Terms for Literary Study), Johnson outlines the importance of theory to analyses of literature. She argues that the history of writing (l'écriture) is an important philosophical, political, and psychoanalytical concept in twentieth-century French thought. She posits French theorist Roland Barthes’ appropriation of Ferdinand de Saussure’s concept of the sign—encompassing both a "signifier" and a "signified"—as the foundation of his theory that language is a “structure,” a system of relations governed by a set of rules. Johnson then goes on to describe the central roles played by Derrida and psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan in destabilizing Barthes' account of the relation between signifier and signified and the “structure” of language. Following Derrida, Johnson argues that reading is not the task of grasping the true single meaning of a text, but of grasping its multiple meanings, which are often unstable and contradictory. This polysemy has allowed feminist and marginalized readers to enter texts at the locations where the author tries to "dominate, erase, or distort" the various "other" claims that are made through language and reassert their identities.