Barbara Johnson papers (Ms.2017.025)

Biographical / Historical

Barbara Johnson was born on October 4, 1947 in Boston, Massachusetts. She was the eldest of four children. Her father was a school principal, and her mother was a librarian. She attended Oberlin College between the years of 1965 and 1969 where she studied French, and from which she graduated magna cum laude with the highest honors. Johnson completed her Masters of Philosophy at Yale University in 1973, where she also received her Ph.D. in French in 1977 under Paul de Man. During her time at Yale, Johnson was also a part of the "Yale School," a literary theory group prompted by the deconstruction philosophy of Jacques Derrida. Major members and contributors to the group included Paul de Man, Geoffrey Hartmann, Harold Bloom, and J. Hillis Miller, all of whom were instrumental in creating Deconstruction and Criticism, a pivotal anthology in literary theory and deconstruction. Influential works by Derrida and Lacan had not yet been translated from French into English, so early on in her career, Johnson undertook translating these, which became her "theoretical enterprise."

Johnson was an assistant professor of French at Yale between 1977 and 1981, at which point she became an associate professor. In 1983, Johnson took a position at Harvard University in the Romance Languages and Literature department, and the Comparative Literature department. She took on several visiting professorships throughout her life at various prestigious institutions, as well as many positions in administrations, boards, and committees. In 1997, Johnson became Professor of English and Comparative Literature and the Fredric Wertham Professor of Law and Psychiatry in Society at Harvard University.

During her time at Harvard, Barbara Johnson met her partner Marjorie Garber, a professor of English, famous for her work and research in Shakespeare and sexuality. The two married and shared homes in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Nantucket, Massachusetts, until their separation in the early 2000s.

As author, translator, and editor, Johnson contributed greatly to the fields of literary theory, criticism, feminist theory, and comparative literature. She grew to be an expert in the poetry of Charles Baudelaire, Stéphane Mallarmé, Sylvia Plath, Edgar Allen Poe, and Anne Sexton, as well as the literature of Nella Larsen, Mary Shelley, Herman Melville, and the writings of Franz Fanon, Jaques Lacan, Roland Barthes, and Jacques Derrida. Her first book, "Défigurations du Langage Poétique: la seconde revolution Baudelairienne," published in 1979, has a focus on criticism and interpretation regarding Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, and Stéphane Mallarmé and their prose poetry. She then went on to translate several of Derrida's works, followed by her second book in 1980, "The Critical Difference: Essays in the Contemporary Rhetoric of Reading," an exploration of the relationship and differences between literature and criticism. Johnson subsequently published "A World of Difference" in 1987, "The Wake of Deconstruction" in 1994, "The Feminist Difference: Literature, Psychoanalysis, Race, and Gender" in 2001, "Mother Tongues" in 2003, and "Persons and Things" in 2008. Her last book, "Moses and Multiculturalism," was published posthumously in 2010. Johnson's books, articles, translations, and lectures contributed enormously to the fields of structuralism, post-structuralism, feminist theory, (de)colonialism, and Lacanian psychoanalysis. In addition, in 1980 Johnson was introduced to, and began to work with, the writings of Nora Zeale Hurston, making her an early scholar to link French literary theory with African-American texts.

Around 2003, Johnson was diagnosed with cerebellar ataxia, a fatal neurological disease. She slowly lost motor control and her ability to speak over the course of the following six years, and died on August 27th, 2009. Though Johnson and Garber never had children of their own, Johnson grew close to a number of her students including Bill Johnson González. Towards the end of her life, Gonzalez became a close friend and caretaker and he started collecting her professional files. Upon her death, Johnson bequeathed her papers to González, who subsequently donated them to the Pembroke Center Archives, with the help and support of Johnson's literary executors Shoshana Felman and Judith Butler.