This book contains deeply personal dialogues with Jewish American writers, from Mark Krupnick in his final work. When he learned he had ALS and roughly two years to live, literary critic Mark Krupnick returned to the writers who had been his lifelong conversation partners and asked with renewed intensity: how do you live as a Jew, when, mostly, you live in your head? The evocative and sinuous essays collected here are the products of this inquiry. In his search for durable principles, Krupnick follows Lionel Trilling, Cynthia Ozick, Geoffrey Hartman, Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, and others into the elemental matters of life and death, sex and gender, power and vulnerability. The editors - Krupnick's wife, Jean K. Carney, and literary critic Mark Shechner - have also included earlier essays and introductions that link Krupnick's work with the ""deep places"" of his own imagination.

Displacement is a unique collection of essays devoted to Jacques Derrida, widely regarded as the greatest influence on the theory and practice of reading and writing of the past fifteen years. Reflecting Derrida's broad philosophical and cultural concerns, the essays in this volume deal with questions of interpretation in literature, psychoanalysis, theology, and political theory. Writing, feminism, Jewishness, radical politics, and the unconscious are all presented here as appropriate objects of a literary study that goes far beyond conventional structural analyses of individual texts. An insightful introduction by Mark Krupnick clarifies the meaning of "displacement," a concept and method central to Derrida's work. Krupnick discusses the recent history and status of "displacement" as a key term in contemporary theory both in Europe and in America.