Barbara Johnson

Barbara Johnson (b. 1947–d. 2009) bridged the heyday of deconstruction and the turn to theory in the 1970s and the ascendance of cultural studies and the turn to ethics in the early 21st century. As Johnson moved the insights of deconstruction into areas such as feminisms, African-American studies, and cultural studies, her attention to “differences within” engaged not only language and rhetoric but also politics, popular culture, and the power of differentiation to both oppress and express particular subjects. Johnson’s career, cut short by a neurodegenerative disease, is framed by her work in translation of Derrida’s Dissemination at the beginning of her career and Mallarmé’s Divagations toward its end. She cast her critical and theoretical project as the translation of structuralism and poststructuralism into literary insight, a process that is easily recognizable in her most anthologized, reprinted, and oft-cited essays, “The Frame of Reference,” “Melville’s Fist,” “Apostrophe, Animation, and Abortion,” and “Metaphor, Metonymy, and Voice in Their Eyes Were Watching God.” Johnson’s work transports critical frames and moves across a variety of genres and fields, from psychoanalysis to law and from Romanticism to 20th-century American popular culture. Her unparalleled readings—of words, concepts, stories, poems—examine how texts do, and undo, what they say. In the process, Johnson’s writing playfully and often surprisingly displaces authority (even her own) to reveal the poetic and political work of multivalence. The wide range of anthologies that include essays by Johnson attest to the tremendous scope of her work and to the difficulty of summarizing even where its major contributions lie.