Socrates refused to write. He said that to write something down is to disembody it: words are left to float here and there, ghostly creatures, perverse and perverted by whatever and whomever they encounter. Of course, we only know what Socrates... [more]

Socrates refused to write. He said that to write something down is to disembody it: words are left to float here and there, ghostly creatures, perverse and perverted by whatever and whomever they encounter. Of course, we only know what Socrates said because it was written. Two thousand years later, French philosopher Jacques Derrida says everything is writing, always and already. He says that when Socrates was speaking he was secretly writing, behind his own back, with and without knowing it: Plato's pen was really Socrates'. For Derrida, language is fundamentally ghostly, even when it's in our heads, when we try to put a word to a thing or idea. Language never had, has, or will have a body. So, what is a text? What is language? What does it mean to write something down and have someone read it clear across the globe, across centuries, perhaps in a different language? Is there a timeless meaning that hovers above the text, guaranteeing its meaning? Or does the meaning itself change? What determines that change? Can the author live up to his or her title in order to act as an authority, controlling the meaning of the words even if he or she has been dead 500 years? Does the reader control the meaning, in a sense rewriting the book as he or she reads? Or does the meaning emerge somewhere else, between the author, the reader, the words, the time, place, and mood? If a book is such an eruption of experience, what makes it the same book over time? Literary theory lives and breathes in the service of these questions. [show less]