DAVID JONATHAN BAYOT:Allow me to begin this conversational journey with you via Peculiar Language. Would it be accurate to say that it was your authorial intention for Peculiar Language to be a polemical response to the prevalent ethos and imperative during the eighties that "the birth of Theory must be at the expense of the death of literature" (to borrow the cadence of Roland Barthes's famous last line in "The Death of the Author")? And would you say that it is meant to "correct" a pervasive tendency within the academic community to misrepresent deconstruction, specifically the ideas of Jacques Derrida on writing, as a "coercive" critical gesture of anti-literature? I believe that your elucidation on the intellectual and institutional context of the book will enlighten the readers on the book's significance.

DEREK ATTRIDGE: First, let me thank both of you for initiating this conversation, which I know will be revealing for me. Whether it will be revealing for anyone else, I'm not so sure, but I'll leave you to be the judges of that.

Now for your question. To be honest, the original impetus for Peculiar Language had little to do with any attempt to correct or modify an anti-literary bias in theoretical studies, something that wasn't very evident — or at least not very evident to me — when I began working on the question of the distinctiveness of literary discourse. The germ of my book was my reading of George Puttenham's 1589 treatise on poetry, The Arte of English Poesie, which I examined as part of my Cambridge PhD thesis around 1970. The thesis was on the Elizabethan experiments in quantitative meter, modeled on Latin and Greek versification — it later became my first book, Well-Weighed Syllables (1974) — but Puttenham's evident problems in identifying what could be said to constitute "poetry" seemed to me to invite further exploration. The opportunity came when, in 1984, I was invited to give a talk at the University of Toronto on a Renaissance topic. I was, at the time, in the USA on an exchange program for staff and students between my university, Southampton, and Rutgers, and the invitation came from someone I had met at one of our "Theory and Text" conferences (which I'll talk about later), Julian Patrick.

In the meantime, I had become interested in the wave of theoretical writing on literature emanating from France. Although I had read Derrida, Lacan, and others while writing my PhD thesis, my main theoretical interest at that time had been in stylistics: the Russian Formalists, the Prague Structuralists, the work of Roman Jakobson, the Continental project of semiotic analysis, the American applications of Chomskyan linguistics to literary studies, and so on. In the early 1970s, Jonathan Culler, then a friend at Cambridge, lent me his recently completed Oxford DPhil thesis, which later became the immensely influential book Structuralist Poetics (published in 1975), and my second book — The Rhythms of English Poetry — was in part an attempt to provide an account of metrical and rhythmic "competence" in Chomsky's and Culler's sense, the mental habits and expectations that made it possible for speakers of English with some familiarity with the traditions of verse to respond to poetry in regular meters. Then, in the early 1980s, while teaching at the University of Southampton, I was fortunate in gaining two new colleag