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reinterpret one so as to be entirely consonant with the other. Placing them side by side, either literally or as if in two columns, compels the reader either to extend both texts' meanings, and to recognize the new meanings produced only from both together. |
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v. Collage: Visualizing the Margins of Comparison |
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I draw a final model for comparison from the writings of Jacques Derrida, who excels in a way of reading that is rigorous yet unsettling. In helpfully describing Jacques Derrida's "grammatological" strategy of decomposing texts into selected "clippings" in order to release them from their controlling contexts, Gregory Ulmer has shown how some of Derrida's most excitingand bewilderingwritings proceed precisely by strategies of excision, recomposition and new juxtaposition, as these produce hitherto nonexistent meanings which could never be otherwise expressed.
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Ulmer appeals to the practice of "collage"borrowed from the visual artsto locate Derrida's way of producing new meanings through decomposition and the subsequent constructive modes of writing: |
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The effectiveness of collage is that, like metaphor, the piece, displaced into a new context, retains associations with its former context. The two operations constituting the collage techniqueselection and combinationare the operations characteristic of all speaking and writing. Moreover, as in language usage, the operations are carried out on preformed material. Derrida uses his decompositional, dissolving, collage technique to break up the clear and distinct outlines of the concept, with distorting effects similar to those achieved in cubism with regard to the conventions of representation in the visual arts. . . The use of collage permits Derrida to escape the traditional "intentionality" in favor of a writing that is productive outside the ideology of communication.20 |
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The process of collage is most vividly pursued in Glas, a text composed entirely of quite different materials (drawn mostly from Hegel and Genet) juxtaposed in two columns which run the length of the book. The "collaged" texts meet, resist and |
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