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By definition, a palimpsest is "a written document, usually on vellum or parchment, that has been written upon several times, often with remnants of erased writing still visible." Palimpsests (originally published in France in 1982), one of Gerard Genette's most important works, examines the manifold relationships a text may have with prior texts. Genette describes the multiple ways a later text asks readers to read or remember an earlier one. In this regard, he treats the history and nature of parody, antinovels, pastiches, caricatures, commentary, allusion, imitations, and other textual relations.

In the English-speaking world, Jacques Derrida’s writings have most influenced the discipline of literary studies. Yet what has emerged since the initial phase of Derrida’s influence on the study of English literature, classed under the rubric of deconstruction, has often been disowned by Derrida. What, then, can Derrida teach us about literary language, about the rhetoric of literature, and about questions concerning style, form, and structure?The Derrida Reader draws together a number of Derrida’s most interesting and idiosyncratic essays that treat literary language, the idea of the literary, and questions of poetics and poetry. The essays discuss single tropes or concepts, a figure such as metaphor, the ideas of titles and signatures, proper names, and Derrida’s thinking on such subjects as undecidability or aporia. The editor’s introduction is a demonstration in practice of how Derrida reads and how he adapts the act of reading to the text or figure in question. The introduction also outlines each essay’s main points, its usefulness for reading literary texts, and its particular area of interest. The Derrida Reader thus provides students of literature with a focused, contextualized, and readily understandable volume.

If not by nature, then by habit, people tend to match one thing with another - man and woman, laughter and tears, sickness and health, fire and water, master and servant - thereby accentuating similarities and contrasts and opening a field of relations. In The Mirror of Ideas, Michel Tournier examines these pairs and a host of others to demonstrate how pairing one object or idea with another generates the work of imagination, philosophy, and creative thinking of all kinds. Tournier treats pairs both lowly and exalted - moving from fork and spoon, horse and bull, cat and dog, to fear and anguish, poetry and prose, body and soul, being and nothingness. Hardly an exhaustive inventory of traditional pairs, his selection nonetheless opens the door to patterns deeply embedded in culture and civilization, speech and writing, memory and habit.

Do words - their sounds and shapes, their lengths and patterns - imitate the world? Mimology says they do. First argued in Plato's Cratylus more than two thousand years ago, mimology has left an important mark in virtually every major art and artistic theory thereafter. Fascinating and many-faceted, mimology is the basis of language sciences and incites occasional hilarity. Its complicated traditions require a sure grip but a light touch. One of the few scholars capable of giving mimology such genial attention is Gerard Genette. Genette treats matters as basic and staid as the alphabet and as reverberating as the letter R in ur-linguistics.