Some contemporary approaches to literature still accept the separation of historical, biographical, external concerns from formal, internal ones. On the borderline that lends this division between inside and outside its apparent coherence is signature. In Peggy Kamuf's view, studying signature will help us to rediscover some of the stakes of literary writing beyond the historicist/formalist opposition. Drawing on Derrida's extensive work on signatures and proper names, Kamuf investigates authorial signature in key writers from Rousseau to Woolf, as well as the implications of signature for the institutions of authorship and criticism.

Peggy Kamuf is Marion Frances Chevalier Professor of French and Professor of French and Italian and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California. She is the author of The Division of Literature, or the University in Deconstruction and To Follow: The Wake of Jacques Derrida.