Kirjahaku

This Reader collects in a single volume some of the most influential essays written by Barbara Johnson over the course of her thirty-year career as a pioneering literary theorist and cultural critic. Johnson achieved renown early in her career, both as a brilliant student of the Yale School of literary criticism and as the translator of Jacques Derrida's Dissemination. She went on to lead the way in extending the insights of structuralism and poststructuralism into newly emerging fields now central to literary studies, fields such as gender studies, African American studies, queer theory, and law and literature. Stunning models of critical reading and writing, her essays cultivate rigorous questioning of universalizing assumptions, respect for otherness and difference, and an appreciation of ambiguity.Along with the classic essays that established her place in literary scholarship, this Reader makes available a selection of Johnson's later essays, brilliantly lucid and politically trenchant works exploring multilingualism and translation, materiality, ethics, subjectivity, and sexuality. The Barbara Johnson Reader offers a historical guide through the metamorphoses and tumultuous debates that have defined literary study in recent decades, as viewed by one of critical theory's most astute thinkers.

This Reader collects in a single volume some of the most influential essays written by Barbara Johnson over the course of her thirty-year career as a pioneering literary theorist and cultural critic. Johnson achieved renown early in her career, both as a brilliant student of the Yale School of literary criticism and as the translator of Jacques Derrida's Dissemination. She went on to lead the way in extending the insights of structuralism and poststructuralism into newly emerging fields now central to literary studies, fields such as gender studies, African American studies, queer theory, and law and literature. Stunning models of critical reading and writing, her essays cultivate rigorous questioning of universalizing assumptions, respect for otherness and difference, and an appreciation of ambiguity.Along with the classic essays that established her place in literary scholarship, this Reader makes available a selection of Johnson's later essays, brilliantly lucid and politically trenchant works exploring multilingualism and translation, materiality, ethics, subjectivity, and sexuality. The Barbara Johnson Reader offers a historical guide through the metamorphoses and tumultuous debates that have defined literary study in recent decades, as viewed by one of critical theory's most astute thinkers.

Best-selling author and speaker Barbara Johnson is famous for seeing and celebrating the bright side of life’s ups-and-downs. Now, in her first-ever devotional, she dares you to lighten up and enjoy life to the hilt. As Barbara says, "You’ve got to hone your ability to fling a smile a mile. Sure as anything, it’ll boomerang right back to you, more accurately each time you toss it out."Barbara knows life is far too serious not to laugh. In 60 wise, witty devotions--salted with humor and peppered with the madcap illustrations of syndicated cartoonist John McPherson--she helps you perfect the art of the well-aimed chuckle.Boomerang Joy is the perfect tonic for when you feel tired or worn out--or when you just want a good laugh and some heartfelt encouragement. Barbara Johnson’s fun-filled insights will help you revel in your relationship with God and spread the joy of knowing His love.Just like a boomerang, joy that’s flung out far and wide will smack right back to you!

Barbara Johnson's ministry to the broken hearted has rescued thousands from the cesspools of life and helped the hopeless learn to laugh again. Now, sharing outrageous humor, rib-tickling insights, and inspiring, real-life examples, she shows you how to put life's trials into heavenly perspective. With Barb's zany humor leading the way like a geranium bobbing in a parade leader's hat, you'll be able to face each new challenge with grace?maybe even a giggle. Soon you'll have your sights set on eternity and your ears tuned to the heavenly trumpeter's frequency as you, too, joyously await that day when He's gonna toot, and we're gonna scoot!"Barbara Johnson's writing may not make us thinner, but it sure does make us easier to live with! She has a way of removing a lot of the grit and grind from our crankcase so we can enjoy the trip from earth to heaven without a breakdown." ?Charles Swindoll, President Dallas Theological Seminary

Join the Queen of Encouragement for a lap around the laugh track!Laughing is Barbara Johnson's favorite aerobic exercise, and Humor Me is a zany collection of her heartiest laugh-filled workouts. Its pages bubble over with fun poked at some of the most laughable things in God's creation: the wonders of womanhood, the thrill and terror of child rearing, the Catch-22 of aging, the mirthful mysteries of men, and that hilarious show-stopper: death.This little book is a big gift for anyone who loves to laugh?or needs to laugh. If you've hit a pothole that has knocked the joy right out of your life, Barbara's favorite gigglers can realign your sense of humor, energize your joy level, and shine a beam of fun-light into your heart.

Laugh your way through the maturity maze with the Geranium Lady!A 2001 cancer diagnosis sent best-selling author and beloved Woman of Faith® speaker Barbara Johnson "crying to God about the way He was bringing my life to a close."In this, Barbara's fourth "last book" of zany joy and senior silliness, she celebrates still laughing and still growing older by poking fun at time-sensitive topics ranging from again (I'm ready to meet my Maker . . . but He's apparently tied up with a previous engagement) to forgetfulness (Of course I'll smile for the camera . . . just as soon as I find my teeth).Humor Me, I'm Over the Hill is the Geranium Lady's irresistibly funny appeal to her fellow adventurers in aging to "live happily to one hundred?or die trying!"

Barbara Johnson investigates the significant and illuminating ways in which both literature and criticism are "critically different" from what they purport to be. Her subtle and provocative studies of Balzac, Mallarme, Baudelaire, Apollinaire, Melville, Poe, Barthes, Lacan, Austin, and Derrida take a refreshing new approach to the fundamental questions of meaning, interpretation, and the relationship between literature and criticism. In each of seven essays, a clear, precise, and detailed reading of the rhetoric of one or more literary or critical works reveals the text's fundamental discrepancies, ambiguities, and contradictions. If rhetoric is seen as language's capacity to differ from literal statement, and if "to differ" can also mean "to disagree, " then the reading of the rhetoric of literature and theory here is an attempt to capture the logic of a text's own disagreement with itself.

Is a willingness to carry an inquiry to the point of undecidability necessarily at odds with political engagement? In A World of Difference Barbara Johnson extends and rethinks the theoretical perspectives on literature opened up by her earlier book, The Critical Difference. Through subtle and probing analyses of texts by Wordsworth, Poe, Baudelaie, Mallarmé, Thoreau, Mary Shelley, Zora Neale HUrston, Gwendolyn Brooks, and others, she attempts to transfer the analysis of "difference" from the realm of linguistic universality or deconstructive allegory into contexts in which difference is very much at issue in the world. New to the paperback edition is a preface that readdresses the question of the politics of deconstruction in the context of current discussion about the life and works of Paul de Man.

In 1980, deconstructive and psychoanalytic literary theorist Barbara Johnson wrote an essay on Mary Shelley for a colloquium on the writings of Jacques Derrida. The essay marked the beginning of Johnson's lifelong interest in Shelley as well as her first foray into the field of "women's studies," one of whose commitments was the rediscovery and analysis of works by women writers previously excluded from the academic canon. Indeed, the last book Johnson completed before her death was Mary Shelley and Her Circle, published here for the first time. Shelley was thus the subject for Johnson's beginning in feminist criticism and also for her end. It is surprising to recall that when Johnson wrote her essay, only two of Shelley's novels were in print, critics and scholars having mostly dismissed her writing as inferior and her career as a side effect of her famous husband's. Inspired by groundbreaking feminist scholarship of the seventies, Johnson came to pen yet more essays on Shelley over the course of a brilliant but tragically foreshortened career. So much of what we know and think about Mary Shelley today is due to her and a handful of scholars working just decades ago. In this volume, Judith Butler and Shoshana Felman have united all of Johnson's published and unpublished work on Shelley alongside their own new, insightful pieces of criticism and those of two other peers and fellow pioneers in feminist theory, Mary Wilson Carpenter and Cathy Caruth. The book thus evolves as a conversation amongst key scholars of shared intellectual inclinations while closing the circle on Johnson's life and her own fascination with the life and circle of another woman writer, who, of course, also happened to be the daughter of a founder of modern feminism.

In 1980, deconstructive and psychoanalytic literary theorist Barbara Johnson wrote an essay on Mary Shelley for a colloquium on the writings of Jacques Derrida. The essay marked the beginning of Johnson's lifelong interest in Shelley as well as her first foray into the field of "women's studies," one of whose commitments was the rediscovery and analysis of works by women writers previously excluded from the academic canon. Indeed, the last book Johnson completed before her death was Mary Shelley and Her Circle, published here for the first time. Shelley was thus the subject for Johnson's beginning in feminist criticism and also for her end. It is surprising to recall that when Johnson wrote her essay, only two of Shelley's novels were in print, critics and scholars having mostly dismissed her writing as inferior and her career as a side effect of her famous husband's. Inspired by groundbreaking feminist scholarship of the seventies, Johnson came to pen yet more essays on Shelley over the course of a brilliant but tragically foreshortened career. So much of what we know and think about Mary Shelley today is due to her and a handful of scholars working just decades ago. In this volume, Judith Butler and Shoshana Felman have united all of Johnson's published and unpublished work on Shelley alongside their own new, insightful pieces of criticism and those of two other peers and fellow pioneers in feminist theory, Mary Wilson Carpenter and Cathy Caruth. The book thus evolves as a conversation amongst key scholars of shared intellectual inclinations while closing the circle on Johnson's life and her own fascination with the life and circle of another woman writer, who, of course, also happened to be the daughter of a founder of modern feminism.

Open this book each morning, and let the "Queen of Encouragement" splash your day with joy.Acclaimed encourager Barbara Johnson has survived tragic adversity to become a merry missionary of mirth to those who need a little laughter in their lives—that is, to all of us! She knows firsthand how the smallest splash of joy can soothe broken hearts with the light of God's love. And she's seen how a simple message of hope uplifts a life that's left in tatters.In these pages, you'll find a daily dollop of Barbara's favorite jokes, heartwarming stories, witty cartoons, and heartache-survival strategies. Share a moment each morning with the Geranium Lady, and soon you, like Barbara, will realize you've been "blessed to be a blessing."

A humorous look at the trials and tribulations of women's lives, and how to cope with them

Essays desribe how to look at the humorous side of life's challenges, hardships, and trials

Barbara Johnson reveals her hilarious anti-aging remedy. Living Somewhere Between Estrogen and Death is your wise and witty guide to the joys and challenges of aging gleefully."They say the best way to grow old is not to be in a hurry about it and Lord knows, I've put it off for as long as I could," says Barbara. But old age happens without any effort on our part. If you're alive, you're getting older. So what happens when you find yourself between menopause and LARGE PRINT? This best-selling author offers a delightful recipe for living life to the fullest in your later years and spices it with loads of laughter. She shows how she came to her own decision to age ferociously instead of gracefully.From savoring the "here and now" to preparing for our glorious future in heaven, Living Somewhere Between Estrogen and Death is a lighthearted and encouraging book on the joys and problems of growing older. You'll laugh at Barbara Johnson's zany insights on aging.

For parents who have been knocked to the floor by bad news and plastered to the ceiling by unwelcome surprises . . . here's a book to prop you up, scrape you down, and (believe it or not) help you laugh again.Bad news is bad enough. .But bad news about your children carries a triple whammy of pain, worry, and "where did we go wrong!" An accident, an illness, an unwholesome lifestyle, a devastating decision?the truth about these awful events can turn your life upside down, isolate you from family and friends, drain you of hope, and overpower you with stress.If that's your experience right now, this book can be a lifesaver. Crammed with practical guidance and sanity-saving laughter, it's a gift of hope to you from "the queen of encouragement," Barbara Johnson and other men and women who are "out there on the dance floor of life, doing the lost-parent shuffle." Drawing on her personal experience, her years of ministering to parents in pain, and the letters she has received from hundreds of hurting (and healing) parents, Barbara Johnson shares:what you can expect in the days ahead?and how to copewhat to do with your shock, pain, and guilthow to find grace for your ongoing stresshow to love your kids without trying to "fix 'em"how to find comfort and encouragement in scripture, friendship, and the knowledge that you're not alonehow to locate a support group?or start one of your ownhow to pull together with your spouse?instead of letting your pain pull you apartShe salts each chapter with wry observations, uplifting letters, sunny day-lifters, cartoons and just plain-funny one-liners?to life your spirits and bring you comfort. Whether you're stuck on the ceiling, groping through the tunnel, smoldering in the fire, or down for the count, this book can keep you moving and even keep you laughing through your tears as you travel the rocky path from "Why me, Lord?" to "Thank you, Lord."

Grab your giggle box! Here comes Barbara Johnson with another helping heap of joy for women of all ages, aches, and "architecture."Author Barbara Johnson's encouraging book about a woman's adventures in aging, Living Somewhere Between Estrogen and Death, became the number-one best-selling paperback in the Christian market for the year in which it was published. Soon hordes of happy readers were flooding Barbara's mailbox with their own favorite jokes, touching stories, and hilarious tales of female misadventures.Now Barb has packed that amazing collection of wacky wit into this boisterously funny new book that's full of "laff leaks" about every stage of a woman's life?from diapers to dentures. No matter what stage of the "hormonal cesspool" you're splashing through, there's something here to touch your heart. You'll love Barb's quirky empty-nest de-cluttering strategies, her joyful insights on stress-soothing, husband-handling, kid-corralling, and parent-parenting in chapters like these:Having a Baby Is Like Writing a Book?Lots of Whining, Begging, and PushingWho Are These Kids, and Why Are They Calling Me Mom?I Finally Got My Head Together?Then My Body Fell ApartWe Started Out With Nothing?and Still Have Most of It LeftLeaking Laffs Between Pampers and Depends is a heart-warming ride over the waves of humor in God's endless sea of love.

Barbara Johnson reveals her hilarious anti-aging remedy. Living Somewhere Between Estrogen and Death is your wise and witty guide to the joys and challenges of aging gleefully."They say the best way to grow old is not to be in a hurry about it and Lord knows, I've put it off for as long as I could," says Barbara. But old age happens without any effort on our part. If you're alive, you're getting older. So what happens when you find yourself between menopause and LARGE PRINT? This best-selling author offers a delightful recipe for living life to the fullest in your later years and spices it with loads of laughter. She shows how she came to her own decision to age ferociously instead of gracefully.From savoring the "here and now" to preparing for our glorious future in heaven, Living Somewhere Between Estrogen and Death is a lighthearted and encouraging book on the joys and problems of growing older. You'll laugh at Barbara Johnson's zany insights on aging.

The Queen of Encouragement has brought a dozen amazing friends to inspire and encourage you!Barbara Johnson's heart-touching, laughter-laced story has given hope to millions of readers worldwide. Now she brings together twelve courageous women who have triumphed over challenges and endured heart-rending losses. With Christlike serventhood, they have reached beyond their own anguish to extend a helping hand to others in need, turning their tears of heartache into jewels of blessing. In their awe-inspiring stories, you will meet women who have faced:a husband's brutal murderthe death of a young childpoverty and bigotryeating disordersan adult child's homosexualitythe death of two sons due to AIDSabusive marriagesheartbreaking divorcefamily members' estrangementclinical depressionphysical disabilitya husband's struggle with homosexualityToday these women, like Barbara, spread hope and joy wherever they go. To celebrate their ministry of encouragement, each of their stories concludes with Barbara's trademark collection of wit and laughter. Open this book and find a pathway out of sorrow and into the sunlight of a life warmed by love and filled with meaning. Read these stories and learn how to turn misery into ministry.

"I never wanted to be in the cancer survivors club. But, then, I never wanted to be in AARP, either!"Barbara Johnson laughingly lifted millions of readers out of the depths of despair with her book Stick a Geranium in Your Hat and Be Happy. In that classic volume of humor and encouragement, she shared how God's gift of joy helped her survive the deaths of two sons and the eleven-year estrangement of another son who was lost in the homosexual lifestyle.Now that same laughter-lined attitude has sustained Barbara during a life-threatening battle with cancer?a battle in which she never lost her bubble of joy. Plant a Geranium in Your Cranium is the inspiring yet funny story of Barbara's journey through a year of illness, frustration?and abundant humor. It's a joyful chronicle of her own experiences combined with dozens of hilarious anecdotes and cartoons sent to her by others who share her belief in the healing power of laughter.

Barbara Johnson's approach to life is positive, uplifting, therapeutic and fun. Barbara Johnson is far from being a cock-eyed optimist?blind to life's grief and disappointment. In fact, her entire ministry of joy and encouragement began in the "slimy cesspool" of her own pain. She is a clear-eyed optimist. And that's why her laughter is so infectious and her widom rings so true in this joy-giving book, which offers giggles and guidance to help you:shore up a sinking self-esteemreach the other side of your griefweather your stress and get rid of your guiltrestore the joys of motherhoodrepair broken relationships with your childrenlearn to live with your illnesscultivate your patience?even when you just don't think you can waitsustain an effective prayer lifemake peace with aging?and go for healthy maturity"Almost everyone needs a splash of joy to get through the mess, to get cleaned off and get sweetened up?refreshed and ready to go again," Barbara Johnson says.