SOURCE: Findlay, L. M. “Taking the Measure of Différance: Deconstruction and The Ring and the Book.” Victorian Poetry 29, no. 4 (winter 1991): 401-14.

In the following essay, Findlay conducts a deconstructive reading of The Ring and the Book.

In the 1990s, when the reception of deconstruction has moved beyond the extremes of zealotry and hostility that marked its early career in North America, there is a continuing need to register indebtedness to its principal proponents in a careful, reasoned, yet critical way. In this essay I hope to contribute to this process by testing several contentions associated with the Derridean coinage, différance, against the experience of reading Robert Browning's The Ring and the Book (1868-69). Recently, other critics have made similar attempts, reading the poem as a “decentered struggle of interpretations”; as “a nesting structure of sacred books, of commentaries on commentaries”; as “a radical review of the...