"This is a very fresh assembly of a wide range of brilliant, learned, adventurous and candid essays that does as much as one book can to communicate the spectrum of all that is happening in the criticism of American literature these days." - Mitchell Breitwieser. Approaching the cultural concept of "difference" from a variety of perspectives, "Discovering Difference" represents the spectrum of subjects and modes of analyses currently employed in literary and cultural studies. Marx, Freud, Derrida, Lacan, feminist, and African American criticism are all employed to investigate topics ranging from cultural encounters at the time of the European conquest of the Americas to the Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill hearings. The contributors are Eva Cherniavsky, Jonathan Elmer, Michael T. Gilmore, Myra Jehlen, James H. Justus, Christoph K. Lohmann, Terence Martin, Carolyn A. Mitchell, Michael Rogin, Cary Wolfe, and Cynthia Griffin Wolff.