Reiterating Performatives: The Writer, the Reader and the Risks of Literary Action

Abstract

“Reiterating Performatives” turns to theoretical work by Jacques Derrida and critical work by Edwidge Danticat to fashion a more capacious, inclusive theory of the writer, and of writing, than those usually understood to have been offered historically by either traditional literary criticism or the strains of post-structural theory that have put that criticism under such acute interrogation over the past fifty years. Without losing sight of the question of latinidad introduced in the previous section, this section focuses primarily on the question of the literary through its analysis of the figure and the work of the writer.