As a scholar, teacher, and translator, Johnson helped make the theories of French philosopher Jacques Derrida accessible to English-speaking audiences in the United States at a time when they had just begun to gain recognition in France.
[1] Her graduate studies occurred during the emergence of the "Yale School," a group of literary critics that included Johnson's thesis director, Paul de Man.
The Yale School's characteristic integration of structuralist and poststructuralist theory into the study of literature became an essential feature of Johnson's approach to criticism.
This polysemy has allowed feminist and marginalized readers to enter texts at the locations where the author tries to "dominate, erase, or distort" the various "other" claims that are made through language and reassert their identities.
Johnson wants to take her investigation beyond "the white male Euro-American literary, philosophical, psychoanalytical, and critical canon" that dominates the academy as a whole and her work in particular.
Through the double lenses of Paul de Man's posthumous Nazi collaboration scandal and the academic community's reaction to the murder of feminist legal theorist Mary Joe Frug, Johnson discusses allegory, feminism, and the misinterpretation of deconstruction.
[4] Harold Schweizer writes in his introduction to The Wake of Deconstruction that "if interpretive closure always violates textual indeterminacy, if authority is perhaps fundamentally non-textual, reducing to identity what should remain different, Johnson's work could best be summarized as an attempt to delay the inevitable reductionist desire for meaning".
"Apostrophe" juxtaposes Romantic poets such as Percy Bysshe Shelley with twentieth-century poems by Gwendolyn Brooks, Lucille Clifton, and Adrienne Rich that deal with women's experiences following abortion.
Johnson's concern with prosopopoeia represents an ongoing elaboration of Paul de Man's work, extending the problems posed in his essays "Autobiography as De-Facement" and "Anthropomorphism and Trope in Lyric" (in The Rhetoric of Romanticism) to feminist and African-American literature.